The Onyx Glossary

Skeletons on my Bookshelves: Books Read During My High School Years (1994-1998)

2012-03-06T09:09:00.004-08:00

Due to lapses in memory, this list is incomplete: I'm especially hazy as to what I was reading in the 9th grade. It's not exactly by order as well. Books marked with an * indicate that they were required school reading. I very rarely read the books I was assigned however, choosing instead to pursue my own literary tastes. Plays I read during this time period (mainly various works by William Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams and some of Arthur Miller's work, such as "The Crucible" and "Death of a Salesman"), along with works of poetry, are not listed here: not that I read all that much poetry back then.

During the 9th grade and for the first half of the 10th grade I mostly just read Star Wars novels. During the second semester of 10th grade I became obsessed with Tom Clancy, which later evolved into a very brief interest with Robert Ludlum. By the 11th grade my two favorite writers were John Grisham and, later, Anne Rice. In the 12th grade I briefly became interested in the books of Elmore Leonard, mainly because one of my favorite film directors, Quentin Tarantino, had adapted his novel "Rum Punch" that year. An interest in indie films that began during the last few months of my Senior year led me to become interested in the Beats, and during my Freshman year at college in the Fall of '98 I read "Naked Lunch" by William S. Burroughs for the first time. And the rest, as they say, is history.

9th Grade (1994-1995)
---------------------

Star Wars: Heir to the Empire (Timothy Zahn)
Star Wars: Dark Force Rising (Timothy Zahn)
The Lost World (Michael Crichton)

Summer 1995
-----------

Star Wars: The Last Command (Timothy Zahn)
Star Wars: Tales From the Mos Eisley Cantina (Various)
Star Wars: The Courtship of Princess Leia (Dave Wolverton)

10th Grade (1995-1996)
----------------------

Star Wars: The Truce at Bakura (Kathy Tyers)
Star Wars: The Crystal Star (Vonda McIntyre)
Star Wars: Jedi Search (Kevin Anderson)
Star Wars: Dark Apprentice (Kevin Anderson)
Star Wars: Champions of the Force (Kevin Anderson)
Star Wars: Darksaber (Kevin Anderson) Christmas Gift!
Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck) *
The Old Man and the Sea (John Steinbeck) *
A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens) *
The White Plague (Frank Herbert)
Goldeneye (John Gardner)
Patriot Games (Tom Clancy) Christmas Gift!
Without Remorse (Tom Clancy)
Debt of Honor (Tom Clancy)

Summer 1996
-----------

Executive Orders (Tom Clancy)

11th Grade (1996-1997)
----------------------

The Road to Gandolfo (Robert Ludlum)
The Apocalypse Watch (Robert Ludlum)
The Scorpio Illusion (Robert Ludlum)
Airframe (Michael Crichton) Christmas Gift!
The Sum of All Fears (Tom Clancy) [did not finish]
Ethan Frome (Edith Wharton) *
The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne) * [did not finish]
The Runaway Jury (John Grisham)
The Pelican Brief (John Grisham)
The Chamber (John Grisham)
The Rainmaker (John Grisham)
The Dilbert Principle (Scott Adams)
The Partner (John Grisham)
Interview With the Vampire (Anne Rice)

Summer 1997
-----------

Pulp Fiction: screenplay (Quentin Tarantino)
Lord Foul's Bane (Stephen R. Donaldson)
Conversations With Anne Rice (Michael Riley)
The Vampire Lestat (Anne Rice) [did not finish]
The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck) *

12th Grade (1997-1998)
----------------------

The Illearth War (Stephen R. Donaldson) [did not finish]
Lord of the Flies (William Golding) *
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) *
Servant of the Bones (Anne Rice)
The Witching Hour (Anne Rice)
Lasher (Anne Rice) [did not finish]
The Street Lawyer (John Grisham)
Jackie Brown/Rum Punch (Elmore Leonard) Christmas Gift!
Out of Sight (Elmore Leonard)
Riding the Rap (Elmore Leonard)
Maximum Bob (Elmore Leonard)
Get Shorty (Elmore Leonard)
The Tenth Justice (Brad Meltzer)
Insomnia (Stephen King) [did not finish]

Summer 1998
-----------

I Shot Andy Warhol: screenplay (Mary Harron/Daniel Minahan)
Rainbow Six (Tom Clancy)

The Butterfly

2012-01-31T10:40:00.000-08:00

I'd like to talk about one of the most transcendent experiences that I ever encountered over the course of my life. The incident in question occurred on July 7, 2006, a Friday: before driving off to work that afternoon, I stopped at the local Stop & Shop supermarket (the same supermarket where I worked part-time for nearly 7 years, from 1997 to 2004). Within this supermarket is a bank where I do most of my banking, such as cashing checks. On the way into the supermarket that afternoon, in the tiny vestibule that leads one into the store, a sudden movement against one of the big glass windows to my left startled me. I looked over and saw a big butterfly bashing against the glass, desperately trying to escape. This butterfly was easily the size of the palm of my hand, its colors being black and blue with a touch of red... very beautiful. Probably the most beautiful butterfly I've ever seen. As I made my way into the supermarket and went to cash my check I kept thinking about this butterfly, and how it would probably die if no one helped it get outside.

So after cashing my check I left the store, then returned to the inside vestibule. There, I took a folded up receipt from inside my wallet and gently placed it near the butterfly. Eventually, it clinged onto the receipt. I carefully cupped it in my hands and carried it outside. It was the first (and, to date, only) time I had ever touched a butterfly, and I handled it so gently because I was terrified of accidentally hurting it: in a short story I wrote years later, when I related this incident I described it as "picture the Virgin Mary cradling the infant Jesus for the first time." As soon as we were outdoors, I opened my hands and let it go and it quickly flew away, into the bright sky above me, higher and higher, it's freedom a joy to behold in the afternoon sun, and it was as if a dark cloud lifted itself off my soul. Just a little act of kindness that to most people would be no big deal... I just wonder how many people passed by that poor trapped butterfly. Did they consider helping it? Did they just not care? Why, out of the multitude of people who passed through those doors that afternoon, was it me who freed it? Was I the only one who cared enough, that afternoon? I mean, keep in mind, this was a butterfly, a creature most people find exotic and beautiful, unlike say, a spider or something (not that spiders aren't beautiful).

But what I keep coming back to was the feeling I had as I watched the butterfly soar away that day. Everything about that afternoon now seems almost surrealistically hyperreal to me, almost mythological even: it felt like something out of a dream, an archetypal experience manifesting in 4-dimensional space-time. It was as if when the butterfly flew into the bright sky a piece of my soul flew up with it, escaping from the banal wretchedness of existence itself. Many Gnostics believed (or I should say believe because there are still some Gnostics out there) that within every human being there is a sort of "divine spark," a little piece of Heaven/God, and that the purpose of existence is to reunite one's inner spark with the Godhead... or something like that (St. Teresa of Avila expresses a similiar idea in her book "The Interior Castle" when she likens the soul to a crystalline/diamond-like palace within which God resides). The idea being that the unenlightened ones, at death, have their spark tossed back down into reality and are forced to keep living a multitude of lives (this concept strikes me as being somewhat similar to the Buddhist concept of Samsara). I guess what I'm trying to say is that for those few moments it felt as if I had become an almost archetypal figure acting out a Biblical parable of sorts (a lepidopteran remix of "The Good Samaritan" one could say: perhaps I could also relate it to Aesop's fable of "The Lion and the Thorn"). For those fleeting seconds it felt as if I had reached some sort of enlightenment, escaped from the wheel of Karma, transcended reality itself... but such moments are fleeting, all too fleeting. In any event, I now think that the divine spark within every being (or, at the very least, my being) is butterfly-shaped.

2011 Reading List Grand Finale

2011-12-31T11:07:00.000-08:00

Books completed in December 2011:

"The Recognitions" (William Gaddis) 12/1/11
"The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein" (Thomas Ligotti) 12/2/11
"The Turn of the Screw" (Henry James) 12/7/11
"Backwoods" (Natty Soltesz) 12/11/11
"Ghost Story" (Peter Straub) 12/11/11
"Supernatural Horror in Literature" (H.P. Lovecraft) 12/14/11
"ACT" (NJ Rhoades) 12/14/11 *
"The Face That Must Die" (Ramsey Campbell) 12/15/11
"Powers of Darkness" (Robert Aickman) 12/21/11
"Lady Gaga/Terry Richardson" (Lady Gaga/Terry Richardson) 12/30/11
"The Hill of Dreams" (Arthur Machen) 12/30/11

2011 Reading List total:

1. "Welcome to my World" (Johnny Weir) 1/12/11
2. "Cold Hand in Mine" (Robert Aickman) 1/14/11
3. "The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse" (Lonely Christopher) 1/20/11
4. "Illuminated Shadows" (James Champagne) 1/20/11 *
5. "Eat When You Feel Sad" (Zachary German) 1/23/11
6. "The Marble Index" (James Champagne) 1/25/11
7. "Brigit" (Andrew Champagne) 2/15/11
8. "Gravity's Rainbow" (Thomas Pynchon) 2/25/11
9. "Demons by Daylight" (Ramsey Campbell) 3/4/11
10. "Neuromancer" (William Gibson) 3/7/11 *
11. "Don Quixote" (Kathy Acker) 3/16/11
12. "Snow Crash" (Neal Stephenson) 3/31/11
13. "Shoplifting From American Apparel" (Tao Lin) 4/1/11
14. "Franny and Zooey" (J.D. Salinger) 4/7/11
15. "The Failure" (James Greer) 4/8/11
16. "The Gospel of Anarchy" (Justin Taylor) 4/16/11
17. "Dhalgren" (Samuel R. Delany) 4/21/11
18. "There Is No Year" (Blake Butler) 4/25/11
19. "Star Maker" (Olaf Stapledon) 5/1/11
20. "Death in Venice" (Thomas Mann) 5/3/11
21. "The Celestine Prophecy" (James Redfield) 5/9/11
22. "Selfish, Little: the Annotated Lesley Ann Downey" (Peter Sotos) 5/11/11 *
23. "The Quantity Theory of Insanity" (Will Self) 5/15/11
24. "Principia Discordia" (Malaclypse the Younger) 5/18/11 *
25. "Topology of a Phantom City" (Alain Robbe-Grillet) 5/21/11
26. "The Archaic Revival" (Terence McKenna) 5/23/11
27. "The Wasp Factory" (Iain Banks) 5/27/11
28. "Stories Toto Told Me" (Baron Corvo) 5/29/11
29. "The Oblate of St. Benedict" (J.K. Huysmans) 6/2/11
30. "Ubik" (Philip K. Dick) 6/8/11
31. "Ecpyrosis: The Best of Starfire Vol. I" (Various) 6/12/11
32. "Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts & Cults" (Jacques Vallee) 6/15/11
33. "Earth Inferno" (Austin Osman Spare) 6/18/11
34. "The Book of Satyrs" (Austin Osman Spare) 6/18/11
35. "A Scanner Darkly" (Philip K. Dick) 6/20/11
36. "Nineteen Seventy Four" (David Peace) 6/21/11
37."Nineteen Seventy Seven" (David Peace) 6/24/11
38. "Nineteen Eighty" (David Peace) 6/28/11
39. "Nineteen Eighty Three" (David Peace) 7/2/11
40. "Q.B.L. or the Bride's Reception" (Frater Achad) 7/7/11
41. "Graves" (Thomas Moore) 7/9/11
42. "The Book of Lies" (Aleister Crowley) 7/13/11
43. "The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy" (Austin Osman Spare) 7/14/11
44. "The Focus of Life" (Austin Osman Spare) 7/16/11
45. "Anathema of Zos" (Austin Osman Spare) 7/16/11
46. "Querelle" (Jean Genet) 7/19/11
47. "Myths of the Near Future" (J.G. Ballard) 7/29/11
48. "Empire Star/Babel-17" (Samuel R. Delany) 8/12/11
49. "The Waves" (Virginia Woolf) 8/19/11
50. "Lost Worlds" (Clark Ashton Smith) 8/26/11
51. "Grimscribe: His Lives & Works" (Thomas Ligotti) 8/28/11
52. "The Great Gatsby" (F. Scott Fitzgerald) 9/5/11
53. "The Remains of the Day" (Kazuo Ishiguro) 9/11/11
54. "Nova" (Samuel R. Delany) 9/12/11
55."Mrs. Dalloway" (Virginia Woolf) 9/20/11
56. "French Hole" (Dennis Cooper) 9/29/11
57. "Tropic of Cancer" (Henry Miller) 10/2/11
58. "The Age of Nothing" (James Champagne) 10/3/11
59. "Confessions of a Mask" (Yukio Mishima) 10/8/11
60. "Vineland" (Thomas Pynchon) 10/17/11
61. "Scared Stiff: Tales of Sex and Death" (Ramsey Campbell) 10/21/11
62. "Confessions of a Guidette" (Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi) 10/22/11
63. "The Marbled Swarm" (Dennis Cooper) 11/2/11
64. "Wormwood" (Poppy Z. Brite) 11/19/11 *
65. "The Haunting of Hill House" (Shirley Jackson) 11/24/11
66. "The Boy With Pink Hair" (Perez Hilton) 11/30/11
67. "The Recognitions" (William Gaddis) 12/1/11
68. "The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein" (Thomas Ligotti) 12/2/11
69. "The Turn of the Screw" (Henry James) 12/7/11
70. "Backwoods" (Natty Soltesz) 12/11/11
71. "Ghost Story" (Peter Straub) 12/11/11
72. "Supernatural Horror in Literature" (H.P. Lovecraft) 12/14/11
73. "ACT" (NJ Rhoades) 12/14/11 *
74. "The Face That Must Die" (Ramsey Campbell) 12/15/11
75. "Powers of Darkness" (Robert Aickman) 12/21/11
76. "Lady Gaga/Terry Richardson" (Lady Gaga/Terry Richardson) 12/30/11
77. "The Hill of Dreams" (Arthur Machen) 12/30/11

*= book I've read at least once in the past

currently reading:

"The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick" (completed Part One)

Reading Lists of the Past:

2008 reading list:

1. "The City and the Pillar" (Gore Vidal) (Jan. 3) 1948
2. "Sway" (Zachary Lazar) (Jan. 9) 2008
3. "Paradoxia" (Lydia Lunch) (Jan. 12) 1997
4. "Eden Eden Eden" (Pierre Guyotat) (Jan. 23) 1970
5. "The Maimed" (Hermann Ungar) (Jan. 25) 1923
6. "Jack the Modernist" (Robert Gluck) (Jan. 25) 1985
7. "The Stranger" (Albert Camus) (Jan. 26) 1946
8. "Less Than Zero" (Bret Easton Ellis) (Jan. 30) 1985 *
9. "The Torture Garden" (Octave Mirbeau) (Jan. 31) 1899
10. "Zombie" (Joyce Carol Oates) (Jan. 31) 1995
11. "The Atrocity Exhibition" (J.G. Ballard) (Feb. 7) 1970
12. "Play it as it Lays" (Joan Didion) (Feb. 10) 1970
13. "The Blind Owl" (Sadegh Hedayat) (Feb. 10) 1937
14. "La-Bas" (J.K. Huysmans) (Feb. 15) 1891 *
15. "Against Nature" (J.K. Huysmans) (Feb. 22) 1884
16. "Moravagine" (Blaise Cendrars) (Feb. 29) 1926
17. "Briefing for a Descent Into Hell" (Doris Lessing)(March 14)1971
18. "In a Glass Darkly" (Sheridan Le Fanu) (March 18) 1872
19. "The Weaklings" (Dennis Cooper) (March 22) 2008
20. "The Mage's Holiday" (Tom Champagne) (April) 2003
21. "Invisible Cities" (Italo Calvino) (April 9) 1972
22. "Exercises in Style" (Raymond Queneau) (April 17) 1947
23. "The Wild Boys" (William S. Burroughs) (April 21) 1969 *
24. "Downstream" (J.K. Huysmans) (April 21) 1882
25. "The Crying of Lot 49" (Thomas Pynchon) (April 27) 1965
26. "The End of the World Book" (Alistar McCartney) (May 1) 2008
27. "Foucault's Pendulum" (Umberto Eco) (May 8) 1988
28. "Us Ones in Between" (Blair Mastbaum) (May 10) 2008
29. "The Man Who Fought Alone" (Stephen R. Donaldson)(May 23) 2001 *
30. "Valis" (Philip K. Dick) (May 26) 1981 *
31. "Angels of Perversity" (Remy de Gourmont) (June 30) late 1890's
32. "Monsieur de Phocas" (Jean Lorrain) (July 6) 1901
33. "Inferno" (August Strindberg) (July 10) 1897
34. "Soul Kitchen" (Poppy Z. Brite) (July 19) 2006
35. "Monsieur Venus" (Rachilde) (July 20) 1884
36. "A Haven" (J.K. Huysmans) (July 26) 1886
37. "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (Truman Capote) (July 30)
38. "Surfaces" (Thomas Moore) (Aug. 7) 2008
39. "Bat-Wing" (Sax Rohmer) (Aug. 13) 1921
40. "Convolvulus & Other Poems" (Kenneth Grant) (Aug. 14) 2005
41. "Recollections of the Golden Triangle" (Alain Robbe-Grillet) (Aug. 18) 1978
42. "Gamaliel/Dance, Doll, Dance!" (Kenneth Grant) (Aug. 23) 2003
43. "The Other Child & Other Tales" (Kenneth Grant) (Aug. 27) 2003
44. "Our Lady of the Flowers" (Jean Genet) (Sept. 3) 1943
45. "The Street of Crocodiles" (Bruno Schulz) (Sept. 7) 1934
46. "The Hearing Trumpet" (Leonora Carrington) (Sept. 10) 1976
47. "En Route" (J.K. Huysmans) (Sept. 10) 1895
48. "Some Kind of Love" (Jack Dickson) (Sept. 14) 2002
49. "God Jr." (Dennis Cooper) (Sept. 21) 2005 *
50. "The Beetle" (Richard Marsh) (Sept. 22) 1897
51. "Action Kylie" (Kevin Killian) (Oct. 20) 2008
52. "Against the Light" (Kenneth Grant) (Nov. 5) 1997 *
53. "The Elementary Particles" (Michel Houellebecq) (Nov. 15) 2001
54. "The Miracle of the Rose" (Jean Genet) (Nov. 22) 1946
55. "Teatro Grottesco" (Thomas Ligotti) (Dec. 17) 2008
56. "Grimscribe" (Thomas Ligotti) (Dec. 23) 1994

2009 reading list:

1. "Songs of a Dead Dreamer" Thomas Ligotti (1/6/09) short story collection
2. "Gnosticism" Stephen Hoeller (1/9/09) religion
3. "Voudon Gnosis" David Beth (1/10/09) occult
4. "My Work is Not Yet Done" Thomas Ligotti (1/12/09) short story collection
5. "Hospital" Thomas Moore (1/23/09) poetry
6. "Nausea" Jean-Paul Sarte (2/18/09) novel
7. "Kierkegaard for Beginners" Donald D. Palmer (2/20/09) non-fiction
8. "Ariel: Restored Edition" Sylvia Plath (2/21/09) poetry
9. "The Bell Jar" Sylvia Plath (2/23/09) novel
10. "Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos" Various (3/12/09) short story collection
11. "The Mind Parasites" Colin Wilson (3/23/09) novel
12. "The Philosopher's Stone" Colin Wilson (4/2/09) novel
13. "The Magus" John Fowles (4/27/09) novel
14. "Snakewand/The Darker Stain" Kenneth Grant (5/2/09) novella collection
15. "Noctuary" Thomas Ligotti (5/8/09) short story collection
16. "Lovely Biscuits" Grant Morrison (5/21/09) short story collection
17. "Ugly Man" Dennis Cooper (5/23/09) short story collection
18. "The Space Vampires" Colin Wilson (5/30/09) novel
19. "Cities of the Red Night" William S. Burroughs (6/29/09) novel *
20. "Safe" Dennis Cooper (7/7/09) novel
21. "The Show That Smells" Derek McCormack (7/8/09) novel
22. "Count Magnus & Other Ghost Stories" M.R. James (7/11/09) short story collection
23. "The Burning Bombing of America" Kathy Acker (7/11/09) novella
24. "Great Expectations" Kathy Acker (7/18/09) novel
25. "Empire of the Senseless" Kathy Acker (7/19/09) novel
26. "Florida" Kathy Acker (7/22/09) novella?
27. "The Place of Dead Roads" William S. Burroughs (7/27/09) novel *
28. "Blood and Guts in High School" Kathy Acker (8/1/09) novel
29. "Perdido Street Station" China Mieville (8/4/09) novel
30. "A Season in Hell/Illuminations" Arthur Rimbaud (8/5/09) poetry
31. "The Shit of God" Diamanda Galas (8/6/09) poetry
32. "Ficciones" Jorge Lois Borges (8/9/09) short stories
33. "The Consumer" Michael Gira (8/17/09) short stories
34. "Funeral Rites" Jean Genet (8/26/09) novel
35. "Inherent Vice" Thomas Pynchon (8/28/09) novel
36. "The Thief's Journal" Jean Genet (9/10/09) novel
37. "The Western Lands" William S. Burroughs (9/16/09) novel
38. "Magic & Mystery in Tibet" Alexandra David-Neel (9/18/09) Hindu/Buddhist
39. "The Gita: a New Translation of Sacred Hindu Scripture" Irina N. Gajjar (9/19/09) Hindu
40. "Official Book Club Selection" Kathy Griffin (9/23/09) biography
41. "Shy" Kevin Killian (9/30/09) novel
42. "Ether, God & Devil/Cosmic Superimposition" Wilhelm Reich (10/3/09) philosophy?
43. "The Letters of Mina Harker" Dodie Bellamy (10/10/09) novel
44. "The Interior Castle" St. Teresa of Avila (10/20/09) mysticism
45. "Lost Souls" Poppy Z. Brite (10/29/09) * novel
46. "Marthe: The Story of a Whore" J.K. Huysmans (10/29/09) novel
47. "The Dhammapada" Buddha (10/29/09) * Buddhist
48. "Downstream" J.K. Huysmans (10/31/09) * novella
49. "The Wall" Jean-Paul Sartre (11/2/09) short stories
50. "The Plague" Albert Camus (11/6/09) novel
51. "The Flowers of Evil" Charles Baudelaire (11/10/09) poetry
52. "The Informers" Bret Easton Ellis (11/14/09) * novel
53. "Cold Print" Ramsey Campbell (11/25/09) short stories
54. "Against Nature" J.K. Huysmans (11/29/09) * novel
55. "The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis" Mark Gluth (12/4/09) novella
56. "In November We'll Burn" Andrew Champagne (12/10/09) novel
57. "The Picture of Dorian Gray" Oscar Wilde (12/16/09) novel
58. "No Exit" Jean-Paul Sartre (12/25/09) play

2010 Reading List Total:

1. "The Devil: Perceptions of Evil From Antiquity to Primitive Christianity" (Jeffrey Burton Russell) 1/1/10
2. "V." (Thomas Pynchon) 1/11/10
3. "Naked Lunch: The 50th Anniversary Edition" (William S. Burroughs) 1/16/10 *
4. "Hollywood Babylon" (Kenneth Anger) 1/19/10
5. "T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism" (Hakim Bey) 1/29/10
6. "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (Lewis Carroll/Camille Rose Garcia) 2/1/10 *
7. "Impossible Princess" (Kevin Killian) 2/7/10
8. "Satan and the Early Christian Tradition" (Jeffrey Burton Russell) 2/19/10
9. "Child of God" (Cormac McCarthy) 2/23/10
10. "The Origin of Satan" (Elaine Pagels) 2/27/10
11. "The History of Hell" (Alice K. Turner) 3/2/10
12. "Blood Meridian: or the Evening Redness of the West" (Cormac McCarthy) 3/13/10
13. "Good Girls Don't" (J.M. Cosentino) 3/14/10
14. "Tongues Tied to Anchors" (Laurence Wilhelm Lillvik) 3/20/10
15. "No Country for Old Men" (Cormac McCarthy) 3/22/10
16. "The Road" (Cormac McCarthy) 3/26/10
17. "Grimoire" (James Champagne) 3/30/10 *
18. "Despair" (Vladimir Nabokov) 4/7/10
19. "Invitation to a Beheading" (Vladimir Nabokov) 4/13/10
20. "Port of Saints" (William S. Burroughs) 4/18/10
21. "Maldoror" (Comte de Lautreamont) 4/23/10 *
22. "Turmoil in the Toybox" (Phil Phillips) 4/25/10
23. "Mere Christianity" (C.S. Lewis) 4/29/10
24. "The New Testament" (various) 5/2/10
25. "The Abolition of Man" (C.S. Lewis) 5/3/10
26. "The Great Divorce" (C.S. Lewis) 5/9/10
27. "A Grief Observed" (C.S. Lewis) 5/10/10
28. "Lolita" (Vladimir Nabokov) 5/15/10
29. "The Screwtape Letters"/"Screwtape Proposes a Toast" (C.S. Lewis) 5/15/10
30. "Wittgenstein's Nephew" (Thomas Bernhard) 5/19/10
31. "Pnin" (Vladimir Nabokov) 5/20/10
32. "Death Sentence" (Maurice Blanchot) 5/22/10
33. "Less Than Zero" (Bret Easton Ellis) 5/26/10 *
34. "American Psycho" (Bret Easton Ellis) 6/3/10 *
35. "Psycho" (Robert Bloch) 6/4/10
36. "Moonchild" (Aleister Crowley) 6/12/10 *
37. "The Book of the Law" (Aleister Crowley) 6/13/10 *
38. "Imperial Bedrooms" (Bret Easton Ellis) 6/17/10
39. "Coma" (Pierre Guyotat) 6/22/10
40. "Pale Fire" (Vladimir Nabokov) 6/30/10
41. "The Conspiracy Against the Human Race" (Thomas Ligotti) 7/11/10
42. "Smothered in Hugs" (Dennis Cooper) 7/12/10
43. "Tao Te Ching" (Lao Tzu) 7/14/10
44. "Necronomicon" (Simon) 7/19/10 *
45. "The Naked Civil Servant" (Quentin Crisp) 7/20/10
46. "The Hellbound Heart" (Clive Barker) 7/24/10
47. "Books of Blood Volume I" (Clive Barker) 8/3/10
48. "Closer" (Dennis Cooper) 8/8/10 *
49. "Kwaidan: Japanese Ghost Stories" (Lafcadio Hearn) 8/8/10
50. "Bruges-la-Morte" (Georges Rodenbach) 8/10/10
51. "Frisk" (Dennis Cooper) 8/11/10 *
52. "Try" (Dennis Cooper) 8/15/10 *
53. "Guide" (Dennis Cooper) 8/19/10 *
54. "Period" (Dennis Cooper) 8/21/10 *
55. "Scorch Atlas" (Blake Butler) 8/22/10
56. "Crash" (J.G. Ballard) 8/29/10
57. "The Curse of the Blue Figurine" (John Bellairs) 9/7/10 *
58. "Brother Curwen, Brother Crowley: a Correspondence" (Aleister Crowley/David Curwen) 9/8/10
59. "American Campgrounds" (Philip Best/Peter Sotos) 9/9/10
60. "The Cathedral" (J.K. Huysmans) 9/25/10
61. "The Malady of Death" (Marguerite Duras) 9/25/10
62. "Recollections of the Golden Triangle" (Alain Robbe-Grillet) 9/25/10
63. "Imperial Bedrooms" (Bret Easton Ellis) 9/28/10 *
64. "At the Feet of the Guru" (Kenneth Grant) 10/2/10 *
65. "Hidden Lore" (Kenneth & Steffi Grant) 10/3/10
66. "Songs of a Dead Dreamer" (THomas Ligotti) 10/5/10 *
67. "Obsessions" (Joseph Mills) 10/9/10 *
68. "Soluble Fish" (Andre Breton) 10/11/10
69. "The Upanishads" (translator: Eknath Easwaran) 10/12/10
70. "First Steps 2 Forever: My Story" (Justin Bieber) 10/15/10
71. "The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi" (Ramana Maharshi) 10/17/10
72. "Uncle Silas" (J.S. Le Fanu) 10/21/10
73. "Siddhartha" (Herman Hesse) 10/27/10
74. "Frankenstein" (Mary Shelley) 10/28/1
75. "ACT" (N.J. Rhoades) 11/7/10
76. "The Collector" (John Fowles) 11/8/10
77. "Dark Awakenings" (Matt Cardin) 11/19/10
78. "Communion" (Whitley Strieber) 11/20/10
79. "Close Range: Wyoming Stories" (Annie Proulx) 11/27/10
80. "The Problem of Pain" (C.S. Lewis) 11/28/10
81. "The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman" (Angela Carter) 12/8/10
82. "The Man Who Was Thursday" (G.K. Chesterton) 12/10/10
83. "Dark Entries" (Robert Aickman) 12/30/10

Leftovers II: The Snow Globes of Patient O.T.

2011-12-14T17:38:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year, I thought it might be interesting to start work on a second short story collection, this one revolving around the following concept: all the stories were to have been set in a city called Thundermist (a thinly veiled nightmare recreation of my own hometown of Woonsocket, Rhode Island). The working title was to have been Sabaziorum: The Thundermist Tales (or something along those lines). The idea was that there would be around 7-8 short stories and a novella. However, upon completing 4 of the stories (and slowly starting a fifth), the project began losing steam... as the months have gone by this year I've gradually lost interest in writing weird short fiction: I still enjoy reading it a great deal, but I've felt as if I've said all I've had to say on that topic and the newer stories I had created, while technically well-executed, were lacking passion and just repeating themes and things that I had already written about in my first short story collection, Grimoire. Still, I feel the 4 or so stories I created have some merit, so for the curious, I've decided to gradually post them on this blog, so that they can at least be read.

This second story, "The Snow Globes of Patient O.T.", was actually the fourth and final story I worked on for the proposed collection. The title of the story was inspired by the Einstürzende Neubauten album title Drawings of Patient O.T..

The Snow Globes of Patient O.T.
by James Champagne

I

“Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.” So begins “The Picture in the House,” a short story written by H.P. Lovecraft on Dec. 12, 1920. It was a statement that had resonated with Daphne Broadmoor ever since she first came across it many years ago, while flipping through the 1985 corrected sixth printing of Arkham House’s publication of Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horrors and Others, a book that she had stumbled across on her father’s bookcase when she was a child, a book with a green dust jacket featuring a Raymond Bayless illustration of Cthulhu emerging from his sunken tomb at R’lyeh. Throughout her twenty-five years of existence, Daphne had known quite a few people fixated on buildings possessing an eidolic glamour: one friend of hers had been obsessed with an old chemical factory situated in the city of Los Diablos (an obsession which had led him to insanity), while another of her friends, Timothy Childermass, adored a church known for its beautiful (and supposedly haunted) frescoes. As it was, there was one place she herself was utterly fascinated with, which, though it was not far from her, was certainly strange: Saddleworth Clinic, a hospital for the mentally insane.

Daphne Broadmoor was born and raised in the city of Thundermist, Rhode Island, and at an early age became obsessed with Saddleworth Clinic, which could be found on the outskirts of Thundermist, not far from Lamb’s Blood Cemetery. Saddleworth Clinic was located atop a flat hill, which in turn towered over a nearby shopping center. The grounds of the Clinic were paved, though weeds grew through cracks in the pavement, and all of the buildings seemed to be in an advanced stage of decay. The Clinic was made up of a number of 4-story cottages that surrounded a circular driveway, along with a few other buildings, such as an infirmary, a chapel, and a small power plant that provided the Clinic with electricity. The cottages, which was where the patients were held, had been built in the 1880’s, and they certainly looked it. They boasted solid rubblestone walls and brownstone quoins, along with arched windows with stick style porches. The outer walls of many of these buildings were covered in vines, and most of the windows were broken. With a few of the cottages, large reddish-brown stains could be found on the walls beneath some of the windows, making it look as it the buildings were crying tears of blood.

For as long as she could remember, Daphne had been fascinated by the buildings that made up Saddleworth Clinic. Sometimes her father would go to the shopping center located at the bottom of the hill, in the shadow of the Clinic, and she would often accompany him. On such excursions she would often gaze out the car window longingly at the decrepit old buildings that made up the Clinic, and her father, catching these expressions on her face, would warn her to stay away from those buildings. When she would ask him why, his usual response was that they were haunted by the ghosts of patients who had been treated cruelly by the hospital’s staff. Naturally, this only served to further inflame her interest in the place. Those old buildings, all alone up on that lonely hill, seemed like something out of a different epoch, as if they had been cut & pasted onto the landscape by some omnipotent antiquarian of architecture, and they looked utterly incongruous when compared to the extremely modern-looking shopping center only a short distance away. To stare up at those haunted and ramshackle buildings (especially during sunset) filled Daphne with a sense of desolation and melancholy that was almost exquisite. It was as if the buildings that made up the Clinic were astral transmitters, broadcasting the final death rattles of lost worlds and forgotten Aeons. All her life, Daphne had been blessed (or perhaps cursed) with an overactive imagination, and she often amused herself wondering what the interior of the buildings of the Clinic must be like, what sort of inhabitants one could find within its walls.

For many years, Daphne had assumed that Saddleworth Clinic was abandoned, that it had been shut down for some time. This perception was proven false in the summer of 2011. On a warm July day, Daphne found herself behind the wheel of her car, driving down Main Street through Thundermist’s downtown area. She had her radio on, was listening to a local station named 8-Bit FM, a station that only played music from video and computer games: right now they were playing the song “Sim Will Build,“ taken from the Sims 2: Apartment Life PC game. She drove by the Thundermist Museum of Work and Culture, the Ye Olde English Fish & Chips of Yore, City Hall, the YMCA, the post office, the police station, the library (where her friend Timothy worked), and assorted tattoo parlors, Chinese restaurants, bars and taverns, Domino’s Pizza and Burger King, Walgreen’s and Dunkin’ Donuts.

Finally she pulled into the parking lot of Duncan’s Drugs, her favorite pharmacy. Daphne exited her car, locked up, then stepped into the drugstore. As she entered the building she nodded to Duncan, a tonsured old gnome with a wrinkled tortoise-like face who sat behind the counter reading that day’s edition of the Thundermist Times. Inside the pharmacy it was air-conditioned, and music was playing over the speakers, “Caribou” by the Pixies. The only other customers in the place were two well-dressed middle-aged white women sitting next to the main entrance, one of whom was clutching a purple satin pillow, resting on top of which was a hairless cat. These two women kept giving Daphne strange looks. Maybe it was because Daphne was black, and Thundermist’s African-American population was very small. Or maybe it was just because she was wearing a pair of pointy cat ears on her head. Daphne shrugged and headed to the back of the store, where the comics were kept.

Daphne found the comic she was looking for (the latest issue of Grant Morrison’s Batman Incorporated), along with some food for her pet hamster (named Babalon), then made her way to the front counter, where she paid for her items. “Hot as hell outside, ain’t it Daphne?” Duncan asked as he accepted her cash and placed it in the register.

“Sure is Duncan,” Daphne said. “Anything interesting in the paper today?”

"Just a car accident that happened last night on Route 23,” Duncan said, referring to a road that led one out of Thundermist. “Old Man Gabriel wrecked his car, was nearly killed. He claimed that he didn’t see what him… the cops think that a deer must have ran out of the woods and he smashed into it, though the cops found no deer nearby, no bloodstains other than those belonging to Old Man Gabriel.”

“That’s weird,” Daphne said as Duncan bagged her items.

“I’ll say. I was just talking to Officer Wilde who was in here a few minutes ago. Said that they took Old Man Gabriel to Landmark Hospital, where he’s still ranting and raving about that damn nonexistent object he hit and other nonsense. You ask me, I think the only thing that Old Man Gabriel’s been hitting is the bottle again,” Duncan confided.

“You’re probably right,” Daphne said as she took the bag from him. “Thanks Duncan, I’ll see you around.”

On the way out of the store she passed by the two older women and heard a little bit of their conversation.

“Althea, is it just me or did Mona look a little out of it at the meeting last night?” one woman asked to the woman who was holding the pillow with the hairless cat.

“Haven’t you heard, Lydia?” asked the woman who was apparently named Althea. “Her son Peter was committed to the Clinic last week.”

“Really?” Lydia asked, going a little pale. “Why, how awful. What’s the matter with him?”

“Mona didn’t tell me much, something to do with uncontrollable tremors,” Althea sighed as she stroked her odd-looking cat. “They had to lock him up in a padded cell. The doctors say they’ve never seen a case like it.”

“Poor Mona,” Lydia said, holding a gloved hand to her mouth.

“That’s a beautiful cat,” Daphne commented to Althea as she passed them by.

“Thanks, it’s a Sphynx,” Althea said with a hieratic smile.

Wow, I had no idea that the Clinic was still operational, Daphne thought to herself as she exited the drugstore, stepping back out into the sweltering July summer. As she walked back towards her car, she ran into her therapist, Dr. Roxy, a thin middle-aged woman with short red hair and heterochromatic eyes, As always, Dr. Roxy was wearing some sort of Native American necklace along with Navajo sterling-silver and turquoise dream catcher dangle-earrings. Dr. Roxy’s office was located in an office building right next door to old St. Durtal’s Cathedral.

“Good afternoon, Daphne,” Dr. Roxy said in a pleasant voice.

“Hi Dr. Roxy,” Daphne smiled. “Long time no see.”

“Indeed,” Dr. Roxy said. “I’m kind of curious as to why you cancelled your appointment with me a few weeks ago.”

“To be honest with you, Dr. Roxy, I’ve been feeling fine,” Daphne said.

“I’m so happy to hear that, Daphne,” Dr. Roxy said with a smile. “I take it you’re still taking those pills I put you on?”

“Indeed I am,” Daphne said.

“I only ask because I know you can be forgetful,” Dr. Roxy sighed. “And you’ve been having no visions as of late?”

“It’s been awhile since the last one,” Daphne said. “Though I still don’t understand why so many people equate visions with insanity. My friend Timothy told me that St. Teresa of Avila had visions, and she was eventually declared a saint.”

“Yes, but St. Teresa had a vision in which her heart was pierced by a lance held by an angel of God,” Dr. Roxy pointed out. “What did your last vision consist of, Daphne?”

“A walrus-demon sodomizing a seraph,” Daphne admitted sheepishly.

Dr. Roxy smiled kindly. “I don’t think the Vatican will be canonizing you anytime soon, dear,” she said. “Anyway, I have some errands to run, so I won’t keep you. Should you ever need anything from me, or if you wish to make another appointment, you have my number.”

“Okay. Nice seeing you again, Dr. Roxy.”

“You too, Daphne.”

Daphne watched Dr. Roxy disappear into Duncan’s Drugs. She then climbed into her car and cranked on the air conditioning. She decided to go home and have lunch. But then she spotted a building across the street, one she had never really noticed before. It was a small and seedy-looking two-story building, with dusty windows and a sinister character. Above the front door was a sign with the following words on it: KIRKBRIDE’S CURIOS.

Must be some kind of antique store, Daphne mused to herself. She wondered why she'd never noticed it before. She decided to go into the store and have a look around. So she got out of her car again, crossed the street and opened the door, stepping into the murky gloom of the shop. She looked around the emporium. The small room was very humid and filled with large glass showcases, many of which were covered in dust, the interiors of which housed baubles and relics resting on velvet cushions. On the walls were shelves holding a number of plaster cast objets d’art, antique sculptures and waxen effigies, mainly Oriental images though there were a few Egyptian specimens also. Daphne peered into a few of the showcases, but their outer surfaces were so filthy she could only make out the dim outlines of the objects contained within. So she decided to check the shelves on the walls instead. Daphne walked past row upon row of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, hawk-headed gods and crystal Baphomets and diamond dogs.

Finally, she found a curio that caught her interest. It was a snow globe of medium-size, with a small flat wooden base. Daphne carefully picked up the snow globe and inspected it. Within the globe was a miniature wintry landscape, and embedded within this landscape were five enlarged Scrabble tiles, bearing the letters L, H, O, O, and Q. Standing within the shadow cast by these letters were two tiny figurines. The first figurine was that of a woman, who was wearing a black fedora tilted atop her head and, on her body, a dark green robe that was slit open in the back, revealing her shapely buttocks. The second figurine was that of a centaur with the head of a pigeon, and in one hand it held a long spear. Daphne gave the snow globe a gentle shake and watched the artificial “snow” inside swirl around the Scrabble tiles and the two figurines. Staring inside the globe, she marveled at how intricately detailed the figurines were, despite their small size. It was then that she noticed the words carved into the square wooden base of the snow globe: In the Shadow of the Calcified Dominion. Beneath those words were the letters “O.T.” She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but something about the snow globe seemed to intrigue her, and she desired to learn more about the mysteriarch who had crafted it. With that goal in mind, she sought out the proprietor of the emporium.

Daphne headed to the counter at the back of the shop, said counter being situated next to a green baize door. The only object on this counter was an old-fashioned cash register. Standing behind the register was a curious-looking fellow who Daphne decided had to the shop’s proprietor. He was a man of indeterminate age, his face being caked with theatrical make-up, his moustache waxed with the right tip pointing upwards and the left tip pointing downwards, as if it were a tiny hairy magician miming the maxim “As Above, So Below.” Strings were tied to his arms and legs, strings that rose upwards to the ceilings. Daphne raised her eyes and saw that these strings were attached to wheels that were in turn embedded into an extensive network of grooves that had been cut into the emporium’s ceiling. This Aschenbachian proprietor, who Daphne assumed must be named Kirkbride, saw her staring at the strings and commented, in an insinuating voice, “You must pardon my outré appearance, Madame. An obscure neurological condition that hampers my movement forces me to make use of these strings to get about. It’s not as if I wish to take on the appearance of a desiccated marionette.”

“Uh, okay,” Daphne said. “I was wondering if you could tell me anything about this snow globe?”

“The snow globe you hold in your hands is the work of Patient O.T., my dear,” the proprietor said.

“Who is Patient O.T.?” Daphne asked, confused.

“He’s a patient at the Saddleworth Clinic,” the proprietor explained. “His real name is Orlando Triffid, but he prefers to go by the alias of Patient O.T. You see, the Clinic features a number of workshops, overseen by a Dr. Nolgate, that allow the patients there to exercise their, ah, creative muscles. My humble shop ends up receiving a lot of artwork designed in those workshops. One of our more popular items are the snow globes of Patient O.T.”

“Sounds fascinating,” Daphne said. “I’d like to buy this. How much does it cost? I don’t see a price on it.”

“I made a deal with Dr. Nolgate that the patients are allowed to set their own prices for the goods they create,” the proprietor said. He reached underneath the counter and pulled out a dusty sheet of paper, the front of which was covered in neatly-typed words. He scanned the list until he found what he was looking for. “The cost of that particular snow globe is: a few drops of the buyer’s blood.”

“Excuse me?” Daphne asked, just to make sure she hadn‘t misheard him.

“Remember, Madame, when it comes to the objets d’art issued from Saddleworth, I don’t decided the prices,” the proprietor said in an apologetic voice.

“Well, I guess I could spare some blood,” Daphne sighed.

The proprietor reached under the counter again and pulled out a small vial. “All you need to do is prick your finger and get a few drops in this vial,” he said. “Do you have a pin?”

“I think I can find something in my purse,” Daphne said. She reached into her purse and fished around until she found a safety pin. She pressed the sharp end against her left index finger until a bead of blood appeared, wincing slightly in pain as she did so. The proprietor held the vial out and she let a few drops of blood drip into the vial. When he had taken enough he corked up the vial and returned it under the counter, while Daphne reached into her purse again and found a Disney Little Mermaid band-aid that she proceeded to wrap around her finger.

“Okay, you’ve got your blood money, will that be all?” Daphne asked with a smirk.

“Let me just go wrap this,” the proprietor said. He gripped the snow globe in his hands and headed for the green baize door, the strings connecting his limbs to the wheels in the ceiling above keeping his frail body upright. He opened the door and disappeared from sight. A few moments later he came shambling back into the room, now holding a neatly-wrapped parcel in his hands. Daphne took the wrapped snow globe from him, thanked him, and left the store. She drove back home, to her tiny house located near Vernon Park, and once inside she unwrapped the snow globe and set it on the mantle of her living room fireplace.

II

The following day, Daphne drove back downtown, this time with the intention of visiting the public library. Her reasons for visiting the library were twofold: first, she wanted to say hi to her friend Timothy, and second to see if she could find out any information on both Orlando Triffid and also Kirkbride’s Curios. She pulled into the parking lot in front of the library and looked the building over: it was a fairly small and modern-looking building, with a large clock built into the brick wall above the main entrance. Daphne had fond memories of visiting the library during her childhood, where she would often take part in their summer reading programs.

Daphne stepped into the air-conditioned library, headed over to the information desk, where she saw her friend Timothy Childermass reading the Tartarus Press edition of Powers of Darkness, a collection of strange stories by Robert Aickman. Timothy was her age, an attractive young gay man with an emo hairstyle reminiscent of the one sported by Adam Lambert during his American Idol days. When he noticed her walking towards the desk, he put his book down on the counter and smiled at her.

“Hey Daphne,” he said.

“Hi Timothy,” Daphne smiled back. She knew he liked being called Timothy but not Tim. “How’s work going today?”

“Very slow,” Timothy sighed. “What are you doing here?”

“Just dropping in to say hi,” Daphne said. “I was also wondering if maybe you could do a little bit of detective work for me when you get off of work today. I think it would be right up your alley, you loving mysteries and all.”

“What kind of research?” Timothy asked, his interest piqued.

“I’m trying to find any information I can about a patient being held at the Saddleworth Clinic, over near Lamb’s Blood Cemetery,” Daphne explained. “The patient’s name is Orlando Triffid.”

“I can check the microfilm in our archives later on,” Timothy said as he jotted down the name ‘Orlando Triffid’ on a nearby notepad. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, see if you can find any information at all on a business named Kirkbride’s Curios,” Daphne said, and she gave him the shop’s address.

“Okay, I’ll look into it and see if I can dig anything up,” Timothy said. “You want I drop by your place tomorrow night?”

“Sure, that would be cool,” Daphne said. “Well, I guess I’d better be off then, I don’t want to keep you from your book.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Timothy assured her. “You working tonight?”

“Yeah, it sucks,” Daphne sighed. She worked at a local cricket farm.

“Tell me about it,” Timothy said. “Anyway, it was nice seeing you.”

“You too, Timothy,” Daphne said as she patted his hand. “Bye.”

* * * *

Timothy stopped by Daphne’s house the following evening. She invited him in and had him take a seat in her living room. In his hands he was holding a manila folder that held a few sheets of paper. The two engaged in some idle chatter, though during the conversation Timothy kept gazing nervously out of the corner of his eye at the odd snow globe located on the mantle above Daphne’s fireplace. Finally, they got down to business.

“So, I did that research you wanted me to do,” Timothy said. “Not that I was able to find out a whole lot. But I did learn some things that might interest you.”

“Cool, like what?” Daphne asked eagerly.

“Let’s start with this Orlando Triffid character. I wasn’t able to find out all that much about his early years, other than the fact that he was born on the island of Phraxos, which is located in the Aegean Sea. His parents, who were emigrants from the country of Zembla, died when he was very young, and he ended up being raised by a friend of the family, a local millionaire who was rumored to be a wizard. Orlando moved to the city of Los Diablos when he was a teenager. During his high school years he worked part-time at some chemical factory that turned out to be a front for the local Mob. He had to find a new job after the place got shut down. Have you ever heard of the Axxon N. scandal?”

“Can’t say I have, no,” Daphne said, shaking her head.

“Don’t worry, it’s all in my notes. Anyway, after graduating from high school Orlando moved to England, where he got involved with Frater Aossic’s New Isis Lodge. This was sometime in the mid-1950’s,” Timothy went on.

“What is this New Isis Lodge?” Daphne asked.

“An occult Lodge of the O.T.O. founded by the occultist Kenneth Grant in 1955. They believed they had discovered a ‘transplutonic’ planet, New Isis, and they were interested in channeling transmissions from it,” Timothy said. “Following the lodge’s termination in 1962, Orlando moved back here, to Thundermist. He started up his own business, designing and then selling snow globes of his own creation. You’ll never believe where this business was located: at the exact same location that Kirkbride’s Curios resides at today.”

“You don’t say,” Daphne said, a little taken aback. “But how did Orlando end up as a patient at Saddleworth?”

“He ran afoul of the law in 1977,” Timothy said, while consulting his notes. “Locals were starting to vanish and the Thundermist Police Department traced these disappearances to Orlando’s shop, which, in case you’re curious, was named Orlando’s Ornamentals. The police got a warrant to search the place, and in the basement they discovered an enormous aquarium containing the skeleton of a gigantic alligator-like creature. And as if all that wasn’t bizarre enough, they also found heaps of human bones scattered around the tank, mostly belonging to women. Forensic science eventually revealed that these bones belonged to the locals who had gone missing. Although it was never proven that Orlando Triffid had killed the people in question, police still had enough evidence to put him on trial, where he was found clinically insane and locked up at Saddleworth, where he’s been ever since: that was back in 1978.”

“He must be a pretty old guy, then,” Daphne said.

“No kidding. When the cops arrested him they also searched his house and found a very strange library, consisting of lots of books on occultism, thaumaturgy and space voodoo.” Timothy sighed and put down his notes. “If you don’t mind my asking, Daphne, what’s your interest in this guy anyway?”

“You know me, Timothy, I dig the freaky stuff,” Daphne said. “See that snow globe I have on the mantle over there? I got it a few days ago at Kirkbride’s Curios. The owner of the place told me that it was the work of Orlando Triffid.”

“Kinda weird that the building where he ran his business years ago is still selling his stuff,” Timothy said. “I wasn’t able to find out all that much information about Kirkbride’s Curios, though, aside from the fact that the building it’s in used to be the property of Orlando Triffid. It was empty for a number of years until 1984, when it became Kirkbride’s Curios.”

“Thank you, Timothy, this helps me out a lot,” Daphne said. “Is that all?”

“Oh, wait, I almost forgot, here’s a picture I managed to find of Orlando Triffid, from an old back issue of the Thundermist Times,” Timothy said as he reached into his folder. He pulled out a photocopied image of Orlando Triffid. Daphne took the photocopy from him and gazed at the picture. It was a mug shot of Orlando Triffid at the time of his arrest, in 1977, when he had been around the age of 40. Daphne was kind of disappointed: she was hoping he would look like Joseph Merrick or something, but all she saw was a bland-looking, balding white guy, whose most distinctive feature were his oddly-colored eyes.

“His eyes look weird,” was all Daphne could think of to say.

“They’re glasz,” Timothy said.

“You mean he had fake eyes?”

“No, glasz is a type of eye color that consists of a blue backdrop, a thin layer of green, and small flecks of scattered gray. You know Chris Colfer from Glee? That’s his type of eye color also.”

“That’s why I love being your friend, Timothy, I learn something new from you everyday,” Daphne smiled. “Thanks for going through all of this trouble for me.”

“Ah, don’t mention it, you know I love it,” Timothy said. “You can keep the folder and all of the notes in it.”

The two talked casually for another twenty minutes, then Timothy got up to leave, mentioning how he had to be at the library bright and early the next day. Daphne walked him to the door and bade him good night. After he had left, she walked back to her fireplace mantle and stared at the snow globe. It seemed weird to look at it now, knowing that it had been crafted by a madman who had most likely fed a number of hapless citizens to a reptilian monstrosity. On the other hand, it would make an interesting conversation piece for a party in the future.

* * * *

Daphne paid another visit to Kirkbride’s Curios the next day. Unlike the first time she visited the shop, she wasn’t the only customer this time. Also present in the shop was a middle-aged woman and her anemic-looking teenage son. They were peering into the dirty showcases and squinting, trying to see past the accumulated layers of dirt and dust. Daphne paid them no heed and instead scanned the shelves lining the walls of the emporium until she spotted a new snow globe, one that hadn’t been there her last visit. This one was slightly larger than the one she had purchased last time, and its interior was divided into two sections. To the right was a miniature mountain range that Daphne guessed was supposed to represent the Himalayas of Tibet. These mountains were riddled with nests, and flying forth from these nests were large red birds with demonic faces. The red birds were seen frozen in the act of flying from the mountain range to the left portion of the snow globe’s interior, which was a miniaturized depiction of the city of Paris. The city was in flames, its shrunken streets littered with a multitude of tiny plastic corpses, victims of the avian ecpyrosis. Daphne picked the globe up, wondering how the birds were suspended in flight, as she saw no strings or hooks of kind any attached to them. She gave the globe a shake and watched it fill up with red “snow” that swirled around the ruins of Paris and the peaks of the mountains like a million bloody souls. She saw that this snow globe also had a title carved into its wooden base: Red Birds Will Fly Out of the East and Destroy Paris in a Night. Beneath this title two more letters had been carved: “O.T.” Daphne felt her breath catch in her throat.

She took the snow globe to the counter at the back of the store, where she again encountered the weird-looking proprietor. He smiled when he saw her. “Ah, Madame, I’m glad you have graced us with another visit,” he purred. “And I see your eye is as good as ever, as you have in your hands the latest masterpiece crafted by Patient O.T.”

“I think I like this one even better than the first one I purchased,” Daphne confessed. “It’s got kind of an evocative title.”

“Ah, yes, I believe it’s a reference to one of the Prophecies of Nostradamus,” he said. “Or perhaps to a song title off the Coil album Musick to Play in the Dark Vol. I. Who knows? Patient O.T. is an eccentric chap.”

“A little bird told me he used to have a snow globe business in this very building,” Daphne said as she set the snow globe down next to the register. “And that he was sent to Saddleworth because he was caught feeding the local populace to a pet alligator he kept in the basement.”

“You know how people around here like to exaggerate stories, of course,” he replied, waving one of his puppet hands in a dismissive manner. “That’s what happens when one lives in a small city such as this, where not a great deal of interest happens. I’m willing to bet that this so-called alligator was probably nothing more than a slightly larger-than-average Gila monster. When I took over this establishment, I initiated a correspondence with Patient O.T., and he swore to me that he never killed anyone, that he had purchased the bones from a mysterious local artisan for use in one of his snow globes, not being aware that they belonged to people who had been murdered. If Patient O.T. is guilty of anything, it’s naivety. But I can see by the look on your face that you remain skeptical, so I won’t try to convince you otherwise. Would you like to purchase that snow globe?”

“Yeah… so what do you need, more blood?”

“Let me consult the updated pricing sheet,” he said. He looked at the dusty list, then said, “The price that Patient O.T. set for this snow globe is: three locks of your hair. Does that sound like a fair deal?”

“Sure, hair grows back,” Daphne shrugged. “Can I borrow a pair of scissors?”

After the proprietor had supplied her with some scissors, she cut out three locks of her hair and handed them over to him. The proprietor thanked her and placed the locks in a Ziploc baggie. After wrapping up her new snow globe in a parcel and handing it over to her, he said, “Thanks again for your business, Madame Broadmoor. In the future, would you like to be alerted as to when new snow globes by Patient O.T. become available?”

“That would be great, actually, it would save me needless trips,” Daphne smiled. “Let me give you my cellphone number.”

After giving away her phone number, Daphne left the emporium, her new purchase in hand. She drove home, wondering as she did so what Patient O.T.’s next snow globe would look like.

III

Over the following weeks, Daphne purchased three other snow globes created by Patient O.T. as they became available at Kirkbride’s Curios. Like the first two snow globes she had purchased, these new ones were visually very impressive to look at, and quite evocative in the mysterious atmosphere they instilled in her mind as she gazed into their glass-enclosed worlds. One of them was entitled The Revolting Science of God, and the interior of the snow globe was done up to resemble a cosmic scene set in outer space, with stars and spiral-armed galaxies and glowing planets and falling meteors. Set within the center of this tableaux was a large floating goddess with the head of an ant, four breasts, eight arms, her legs folded in the Lotus meditation position, and a crown of sparkling jewels on her head. Standing in front of this odd-looking idol was the figurine of a tiny man shielding his face from her insectile visage. This snow globe had cost Daphne a few drops of her salvia.

Another of the snow globes was called Funeral Music for St. Gulik, and it depicted a typically wintry setting, one adorned with a large black cockroach whose body had been preserved via taxidermy. This cockroach stood upright in the center of the landscape of snow, next to a small Gothic-looking church whose rose window above the front doors had been replaced with an eye. Pressed up against the windows of the church were the faces of a number of tiny figurines, expressions of horror and loathing on their countenances. The price for this snow globe had been a portion of one of her fingernails. After purchasing this one, Daphne idly wondered what the cost of future snow globes would be. She hoped they would never require urine, fecal matter, or nasal mucus, because that would just be gross.

She received her answer upon purchasing the third new snow globe: this one had required just a few more drops of her blood, and a smaller amount than she had given for the first snow globe she had purchased. This snow globe, which was called Burrowers Beneath, was filled with a great deal of soil, and built up on the surface of this soul were a number of structures that resembled the houses designed by the Ancient Pueblo People. Meanwhile, below the surface of the soil, there were what looked like three large white tentacles that, even though they were stuck in place, still seemed to wriggle and undulate with a mind of their own, as if they could burst forth to the surface at any second.

As time went by, her collection of Patient O.T.’s snow globes was beginning to consume more and more space on the mantle of her fireplace. She found herself spending a great deal of time standing before this fireplace and gazing into each of the snow globes. It was as if she had a small number of tiny parallel universes at her fingertips, each one encased in glass and water, containing a fragment of some creepy elfland, a DNA sample of a Dadaistic heaven. Daphne tried to imagine how she would appear to the miniscule inhabitants of these glass-encased galaxies. Most likely all they would be able to perceive of her was a gigantic eyeball, perhaps belonging to some malevolent demiurge. Was that why so many of the figurines entombed in Patient O.T.’s snow globes had expressions of the most profound horror on their plastic faces? Was it because they could see a glimpse of God that is veiled from our own eyes, and that this God was one of madness and morbidity? Daphne found herself grateful that these tiny tortured souls weren’t cursed with consciousness, as then their suffering would be too ghastly to consider: they’d be doomed to a horror that never ended, trapped eternally on the borderland of death but never reaching the bliss of non-existence: frozen in Hell.

A few days after purchasing Burrowers Beneath, Daphne had to pay another visit to Duncan’s Drugs to buy some more food for her hamster. She walked into the store on another typically sweltering summer day, only this time she was the only person inside the store, aside from Duncan at the register of course. Daphne headed to the back of the store to pick up the hamster food. As she made her way there, the ground began to suddenly shake beneath her feet, and it was as if the whole world began to rumble around her. Losing her balance, Daphne fell to the ground and lay still, where she covered the back of her head with her hands. In her confusion, she thought, Are we having an earthquake? Finally, after a minute or so the rumbling began to lessen, then stopped entirely, and the earth ceased shaking. Daphne slowly got to her feet and looked around the drugstore. To her surprise, not a single object had fallen off the shelves, despite the massive tremors that had just taken place.

Daphne rushed over to Duncan, a panicked expression on her face. He looked up at her blandly, not phased at all. “Duncan, did you just feel that?” Daphne cried excitedly. “I think we had an earthquake!”

“Daphne, what are you talking about?” Duncan asked. “I didn’t feel anything at all. Are you okay, Daphne?”

“But I felt the whole world start to shake just now,” Daphne said, breaking into a sweat. “It was so bad I lost my balance and fell.”

“Maybe you fainted from the heat?” Duncan suggested. “It is very hot outside, after all. Look, Daphne, if there had been an earthquake just now, there’s no way my shelves would look this good. They’d have spilled their contents all over the floor, right?”

“But I didn’t faint… I was conscious the whole time,” Daphne said haltingly.

“Maybe you should just go home and get some rest,” Duncan said kindly. “Do you want me to call someone to give you a ride home?”

“No… no, I’ll be okay,” Daphne said after a pause. “I’m fine now.”

“Are you sure?” Duncan asked, still concerned.

“I’m sure,” Daphne said. “Thanks for asking, though.”

“No problem,” Duncan said.

Daphne decided to buy the hamster food some other time. She left the drugstore, still feeling confused. What the hell had just happened back there, anyway? How could Duncan not have felt those tremors? Had it been possible that the tremors were all in her head? But that couldn’t be: after all, they had been so powerful they had knocked her off her feet.

A nagging fear in the back of her mind compelled her to enter Kirkbride’s Curios. Once inside the shop she went straight to the proprietor, who nodded at her when he saw her approach.

“Ah, Madame, I’m sorry but there are no new snow globes from Patient O.T. available today,” he said in an apologetic tone.

“That’s okay,” Daphne said. “I just have a quick question for you. Am I the only person in this town who has ever purchased snow globes made by Patient O.T.? Or have there been other customers?”

“Oh, I’ve been selling them for years now,” the proprietor said. “Don’t you remember that day you first came in here, when I told you they were one of our most popular items? As I recall, prior to your interest in them the last two people I sold snow globes to was a young man named Peter and some old gentleman, whose name I forget.”

“Was it Gabriel?” Daphne asked, her blood turning cold.

“Might have been,” the proprietor shrugged. “Why do you ask?”

“No reason,” Daphne said, almost to herself. Without another word, she turned and left the emporium. She stood outside in the hot sun, almost overwhelmed by the intense heat. You’re not going insane, she told herself. You’re not going insane.

A second later she saw a snowflake drift down from the sky and land right in front of her feet. She stared down at it. Despite the fact it was over ninety degrees outside, the snowflake didn’t melt.

* * * *

That night Daphne had a dream in which she found herself standing before the buildings that made up the Saddleworth Clinic. In the dream it was the dead of night, and a horned moon hung in the sky, like the mocking smile of some enormous and otherwise invisible demon resting its head upon the sky as if it were a pillow. The air all around Daphne was filled with snowflakes, but these flakes weren’t falling: rather they were frozen in place, as if someone had hit the PAUSE button to the procession of time.

The cottages of the Clinic seemed to be calling out to her, beckoning for her to enter them. So she entered the one that was closest to her. Inside, she found that the interior of the building was in complete disarray: the floors of the hallways were strewn with shards of glass and trash of all shapes and sizes, and the surface of almost every appliance or machine was covered with either rust or dust. The walls weren’t in much better shape, as the paint had peeled off of most of them. In some places there were even holes in the walls, and from these holes Daphne could hear the sounds of what sounded like muffled snuffling noises, and the muted ticking of monstrous subterranean clocks, clocks buried beneath the earth long ago and ticking down the hours till Megiddo time.

This building was inhabited by a small number of doctors and patients, though none of these people seemed to acknowledge Daphne’s presence among them. The doctors were all dressed in soiled lab coats, their heads encased in dirty glass fishbowls, the scratched glass distorting the appearance of their haggard and weary faces. As they shuffled through the dark and lonely corridors of the Clinic, seemingly aimless in their peregrinations and utterly without a final destination in mind, they made notations on pieces of paper attached to the clipboards that all of them seemed to carry. At one point in the dream, one of these doctors strolled by Daphne, and she took a glance at what the doctor had written down. But it was just nonsense: “I'm a Labour party candidate and I'm okay - I prescribe phenoxymethylpenicillin to blowlamps all night and I teleport circuit boards all day.”

The patients were just as strange. Most of them were either clad in togas or completely nude, and most of them were wearing exotic headgear of some sorts: Daphne spotted funeral veils, bejeweled turbans, crowns of thorns and crowns of grass… she even noticed one patient wearing a fez. Many of them were stationed in their rooms, rooms that had no doors and whose windows were bereft of glass. As she walked by these rooms, Daphne peered into each one. One room was utterly without furniture of any sort, and in the center of this room there was a large mound of skulls arranged in a vaguely pyramidal shape, with a small family of crows crouched atop it at various places. In the northwest corner of the room a naked patient was huddling, her bare body shivering from the cold wind that seemed to blow at all times through the halls of that lonely Lupanare.

Finally, Daphne came to a door that had a small index card taped to the side of it. Written on this index card in a childish scrawl were the words “Patient O.T.” Daphne peered into the room. It was bloated with shadows, the only illumination being provided from a moon beam that fell into the room through a large crack in the ceiling. In the beam of this light Daphne could see a man seated at a worktable with his back to her. His shoulders were all hunched up and he appeared to be hard at work on a project. Daphne entered the room and walked over to the man. As she got closed, she could see that he was dressed in shabby clothes, and that his body was covered in spider webs, many of which rose all the way to the ceiling. Daphne was soon closer enough so that she could peer over the man’s shoulder and see what he was working on. She saw the man was in the process of constructing a snow globe. At that moment, he was creating a figurine to place within the globe, and Daphne couldn’t help but notice that the figurine bore a great resemblance to her own features. Next to the partially-constructed snow globe was a paper towel, and resting on this paper towel were some lockets of hair, a portion of a fingernail, and three vials, one of which was filled with a saliva-like fluid, the other two containing blood. Suddenly, the man stiffened and turned his head around to stare at Daphne. At the spot where his face should have been there was instead a glass orb built into his face, and within this orb was a large eye that was partly blue and party green, with small flecks of gray. Also swirling within this orb were hundreds of tiny white dots, that Daphne at first assumed to be snow, but on closer inspection turned out to be miniscule trapped souls.

* * * *

Daphne experienced a great shock in looking out her window the following morning. Outside, it was as if she were gazing at a winter wonderland: snow had covered every surface, the nearby lake at Vernon Park had frozen over, and large icicles hung from the overhang of her roof. Yet despite the fact she was freezing, the people walking down the street outdoors were dressed for the summer: some men weren’t even wearing shirts. Which made sense: after all, it was late July, and when Daphne checked her outdoor thermometer she saw that the temperature was 95 degrees. The weatherman on the local news channel confirmed this, as did the Weather Bug program installed on her computer. Yet it seemed as if Daphne were the only person who could see and feel this snow.

Which means that maybe this is all in your head, Daphne thought, trying not to panic. She placed a call to her therapist, Dr. Roxy, but only got her answering machine. Which wasn’t all that surprising, seeing it was the weekend and her office was closed. Daphne looked outside the window. Is the whole world like this now? she wondered. There was only one way to find out. She decided to hop into her car and drive out of Thundermist, and see how far this landscape of snow and ice extended.

So she put on her winter coat and exited her house, noticing as she did so that the people walking by on the streets were gazing at her as if she were a crazy person. She climbed into her car, gunned the engine, and started making her way out of town. The longer she drove, the more panicked she became, and soon she was driving pretty fast. Eventually she was on Route 23 and headed south, as far away from the city as she could. To distract herself she was blaring Coil’s song “Snow” at a very loud volume.

A minute later Daphne’s car crashed. Daphne was thrown out of the windshield, glass exploding everywhere, and she smacked against something like a fly splattering against a window, before falling back to the street. For a moment, she was unconscious. When she came to, she weakly sat up, the pain wracking her body almost agonizing in its severity. Dazed, she looked at the smashed remains of her car. The entire front portion of it was crumpled. Yet she had no idea what she could have hit. No other cars were on the road. It was as if she had smashed into an invisible barrier.

Daphne began coughing up blood. Delirious with pain, she dragged herself off of the road, her legs all mangled up and bloody. Once off the road, she collapsed on the frozen earth and gazed up at the dark gray sky. She saw a gigantic eye gazing down at her, an eye that was blue and green in color with a few small flecks of gray. Then the whole world began to tremble again, and the snow began dancing and swirling all around dying Daphne.

* * * *

Saddleworth Clinic.

Another picture of Saddleworth Clinic.

Entrance to one of the Saddleworth buildings.

Saddleworth Clinic in the 19th century.

Thundermist Public Library.

H.P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror and Others.

L.H.O.O.Q.

Burrowers Beneath.

Sim Will Build.

The Pixies: "Caribou."

Coil: "Red Birds Will Fly Out of the East and Destroy Paris in a Night."

Coil: "The Snow."

Leftovers I: The Aphotic Zone

2011-11-22T13:46:00.000-08:00

The Lemming Syndrome

2011-10-28T08:41:00.000-07:00

I wrote the following short story in the tenth grade for extra credit towards my English class: the exact date was April 26, 1996, to be precise. I think it could be classified as my first "horror" story, and despite the Michael Crichton-ish title it seems that I'm actually channeling the misanthropy of Thomas Ligotti... around 10 years or so before I discovered him, of course. I'm kind of charmed by the notion that even before the Lemming Syndrome began, apparently 10% of Portugal's population was killing themselves off on a yearly basis. My (somewhat mortified) English teacher wrote the following comment at the end of the story: "Good gravy, James- pretty freaky! I'm glad this is only a story and not reality. I like the world being populated- don't you? You have an interesting style of writing. Can you write something perhaps a little less morbid? You have a talent for writing- you should continue. Good title."

The Lemming Syndrome

by James Champagne

Suicide was, as a definition, the act of killing oneself purposely. Only two creatures on Earth were known to commit suicide everyday. The humans, of course, and the lemmings. Lemmings were hamster-sized rodents, most of whom lived underground who, for no apparent reason, occasionally gathered in huge crowds and, single-file, jumped off cliffs to their deaths or drowned themselves. There were speculations done on why they did this, but none were proven. Anyway, the world would soon be experiencing suicide, and many people would die.

It began September 4th, 1995, in Portugal, and from there the evil began to spread, and no one knew it would soon envelope the entire world and its inhabitants.

Portugal’s suicide rate before the 4th was only a mere 10%. One week after the forth, it was 30%. This worried the leaders of the countries. By the end of the month, they were up to 50%, and the suicide rate was rising.

News coverage began, and more and more people in Portugal began to kill themselves, without warning. A man went to work one day, jumped off a bridge the next. Portugal’s population began to drop, slowly at first, then like a wildfire. Soon, no one was left.

Everyone in Portugal was dead. No one could explain this phenomenon of nature, but it was soon dubbed “The Lemming Syndrome”.

People in Spain began to kill themselves. When everyone in Spain was dead, it hit France. The countries were littered with bodies. People began to flee the country. But there was nowhere to run. To avoid contamination, soldiers were sent to the countries, but they just killed themselves, too.

Italy. Greece. Poland. Germany. It was spreading all over Europe. People, normal one day, just killed themselves. Guns, knives, jumping off buildings, any way they could, even drowning themselves.

The world was shocked when everyone in England died. After that, everyone in Europe was dead.

Then it hit Asia. China was the worst off. Millions of people, dead. Japan became a ghost town.

Africa was hit hard too. Like the awful famines and the Ebola virus, hundreds began to die. People just simply killed themselves. Soon, they were all dead, just like Australia, and Europe, and Asia. Billions of people had committed suicide, and the continents were devoid of human life. Buildings, homes, streets empty. Bodies, skeletons everywhere.

South America was next. To avoid contamination, and for the preservation of the human species, North America bombed the South with nuclear bombs. South America was destroyed, and all that was left was the United States and Canada. Everyone else died.

The problem was gone. The self-proclaimed “Lemming Syndrome” was gone. Things were back to normal.

Then, in America, a man killed himself…

backcover blurb for a non-existent fantasy novel

2011-10-26T16:21:00.001-07:00

To the humans, dwarves and elves who have lived there all their life, the city of Belladonna is the only world that exists. For as long as anyone can remember, the city and its surrounding countryside has been encircled by a vast ring of impenetrable darkness, a darkness that, every year, inches closer and closer to the city, consuming everything in its path. Attempts to pierce this darkness has only led to the disappearance of those who step beyond the circle of night. For Belladonna is a city where long ago the Sun vanished, ushering in an endless night and a devastating ice age. By all accounts, all life should have died out long ago, were it not for the advent of the Bido, a mysterious artificial star that simulates day and night and once again made life in Belladonna possible. But who (or what) created the Bido and set it in place above the city? And how long until its rays are extinguished by the slowly creepy, ever-expanding ring of darkness?

The elven spy known as Severin Feymarch doesn't bother himself with such speculations. Making a living as a thief of information, he prowls the borders of Belladonna's eternal twilight, its claustrophobic and twisting labyrinth of streets and towering apartment blocks, carrying out risky data heists for clients who can afford his illegal services. But Severin soon finds himself getting drawn into a vast conspiracy which will not only expose him to the sinister past of Belladonna, but also to what lies behind the outer dark, and how it came to be...

2011 Reading List Monthly Update: September

2011-09-30T10:27:00.000-07:00

Books completed in September 2011:

"The Great Gatsby" (F. Scott Fitzgerald) 9/5/11
"The Remains of the Day" (Kazuo Ishiguro) 9/11/11
"Nova" (Samuel R. Delany) 9/12/11
"Mrs. Dalloway" (Virginia Woolf) 9/20/11
"French Hole" (Dennis Cooper) 9/29/11

2011 Reading List total:

1. "Welcome to my World" (Johnny Weir) 1/12/11
2. "Cold Hand in Mine" (Robert Aickman) 1/14/11
3. "The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse" (Lonely Christopher) 1/20/11
4. "Illuminated Shadows" (James Champagne) 1/20/11 *
5. "Eat When You Feel Sad" (Zachary German) 1/23/11
6. "The Marble Index" (James Champagne) 1/25/11
7. "Brigit" (Andrew Champagne) 2/15/11
8. "Gravity's Rainbow" (Thomas Pynchon) 2/25/11
9. "Demons by Daylight" (Ramsey Campbell) 3/4/11
10. "Neuromancer" (William Gibson) 3/7/11 *
11. "Don Quixote" (Kathy Acker) 3/16/11
12. "Snow Crash" (Neal Stephenson) 3/31/11
13. "Shoplifting From American Apparel" (Tao Lin) 4/1/11
14. "Franny and Zooey" (J.D. Salinger) 4/7/11
15. "The Failure" (James Greer) 4/8/11
16. "The Gospel of Anarchy" (Justin Taylor) 4/16/11
17. "Dhalgren" (Samuel R. Delany) 4/21/11
18. "There Is No Year" (Blake Butler) 4/25/11
19. "Star Maker" (Olaf Stapledon) 5/1/11
20. "Death in Venice" (Thomas Mann) 5/3/11
21. "The Celestine Prophecy" (James Redfield) 5/9/11
22. "Selfish, Little: the Annotated Lesley Ann Downey" (Peter Sotos) 5/11/11 *
23. "The Quantity Theory of Insanity" (Will Self) 5/15/11
24. "Principia Discordia" (Malaclypse the Younger) 5/18/11 *
25. "Topology of a Phantom City" (Alain Robbe-Grillet) 5/21/11
26. "The Archaic Revival" (Terence McKenna) 5/23/11
27. "The Wasp Factory" (Iain Banks) 5/27/11
28. "Stories Toto Told Me" (Baron Corvo) 5/29/11
29. "The Oblate of St. Benedict" (J.K. Huysmans) 6/2/11
30. "Ubik" (Philip K. Dick) 6/8/11
31. "Ecpyrosis: The Best of Starfire Vol. I" (Various) 6/12/11
32. "Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts & Cults" (Jacques Vallee) 6/15/11
33. "Earth Inferno" (Austin Osman Spare) 6/18/11
34. "The Book of Satyrs" (Austin Osman Spare) 6/18/11
35. "A Scanner Darkly" (Philip K. Dick) 6/20/11
36. "Nineteen Seventy Four" (David Peace) 6/21/11
37."Nineteen Seventy Seven" (David Peace) 6/24/11
38. "Nineteen Eighty" (David Peace) 6/28/11
39. "Nineteen Eighty Three" (David Peace) 7/2/11
40. "Q.B.L. or the Bride's Reception" (Frater Achad) 7/7/11
41. "Graves" (Thomas Moore) 7/9/11
42. "The Book of Lies" (Aleister Crowley) 7/13/11
43. "The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy" (Austin Osman Spare) 7/14/11
44. "The Focus of Life" (Austin Osman Spare) 7/16/11
45. "Anathema of Zos" (Austin Osman Spare) 7/16/11
46. "Querelle" (Jean Genet) 7/19/11
47. "Myths of the Near Future" (J.G. Ballard) 7/29/11
48. "Empire Star/Babel-17" (Samuel R. Delany) 8/12/11
49. "The Waves" (Virginia Woolf) 8/19/11
50. "Lost Worlds" (Clark Ashton Smith) 8/26/11
51. "Grimscribe: His Lives & Works" (Thomas Ligotti) 8/28/11
52. "The Great Gatsby" (F. Scott Fitzgerald) 9/5/11
53. "The Remains of the Day" (Kazuo Ishiguro) 9/11/11
54. "Nova" (Samuel R. Delany) 9/12/11
55."Mrs. Dalloway" (Virginia Woolf) 9/20/11
56. "French Hole" (Dennis Cooper) 9/29/11

*= book I've read at least once in the past

currently reading:

"Tropic of Cancer" (Henry Miller)
"Vineland" (Thomas Pynchon)

Trinity Finis

2011-09-26T18:46:00.000-07:00

This afternoon I completed Metatron's Arch, an epic fantasy novel composed of three volumes: Illuminated Shadows (written from July 13th of 2000 to October 7th of that same year), followed by The Marble Index (written from August 8th of 2010 to January 2nd of 2011), and The Age of Nothing, which I began on January 28th of this year and finished today. The three volumes combine to form one enormous 882 page novel. Each volume was written out entirely by hand. I'm not sure if I'll ever try to get it published: I don't feel like typing the whole thing out, then there's the question of editing it (as volume I in particular is kind of weak, seeing as I was only 20 when I wrote it, and is thus very derivative). And I always just saw it as a fun thing to work on in between my more serious literary projects. In any event, it's a good feeling to finally wrap up a story I've had in my head for eleven years now, and to bring it all to a close. Actually, it feels good not having any writing projects to speak of at all right now.

2011 Reading List Monthly Update: August

2011-09-01T08:23:00.000-07:00

Books completed in August 2011:

"Empire Star/Babel-17" (Samuel R. Delany) 8/12/11
"The Waves" (Virginia Woolf) 8/19/11
"Lost Worlds" (Clark Ashton Smith) 8/26/11
"Grimscribe: His Lives & Works" (Thomas Ligotti) 8/28/11 * (first time I've ever read this newly revised edition though)

2011 Reading List total:

1. "Welcome to my World" (Johnny Weir) 1/12/11
2. "Cold Hand in Mine" (Robert Aickman) 1/14/11
3. "The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse" (Lonely Christopher) 1/20/11
4. "Illuminated Shadows" (James Champagne) 1/20/11 *
5. "Eat When You Feel Sad" (Zachary German) 1/23/11
6. "The Marble Index" (James Champagne) 1/25/11
7. "Brigit" (Andrew Champagne) 2/15/11
8. "Gravity's Rainbow" (Thomas Pynchon) 2/25/11
9. "Demons by Daylight" (Ramsey Campbell) 3/4/11
10. "Neuromancer" (William Gibson) 3/7/11 *
11. "Don Quixote" (Kathy Acker) 3/16/11
12. "Snow Crash" (Neal Stephenson) 3/31/11
13. "Shoplifting From American Apparel" (Tao Lin) 4/1/11
14. "Franny and Zooey" (J.D. Salinger) 4/7/11
15. "The Failure" (James Greer) 4/8/11
16. "The Gospel of Anarchy" (Justin Taylor) 4/16/11
17. "Dhalgren" (Samuel R. Delany) 4/21/11
18. "There Is No Year" (Blake Butler) 4/25/11
19. "Star Maker" (Olaf Stapledon) 5/1/11
20. "Death in Venice" (Thomas Mann) 5/3/11
21. "The Celestine Prophecy" (James Redfield) 5/9/11
22. "Selfish, Little: the Annotated Lesley Ann Downey" (Peter Sotos) 5/11/11 *
23. "The Quantity Theory of Insanity" (Will Self) 5/15/11
24. "Principia Discordia" (Malaclypse the Younger) 5/18/11 *
25. "Topology of a Phantom City" (Alain Robbe-Grillet) 5/21/11
26. "The Archaic Revival" (Terence McKenna) 5/23/11
27. "The Wasp Factory" (Iain Banks) 5/27/11
28. "Stories Toto Told Me" (Baron Corvo) 5/29/11
29. "The Oblate of St. Benedict" (J.K. Huysmans) 6/2/11
30. "Ubik" (Philip K. Dick) 6/8/11
31. "Ecpyrosis: The Best of Starfire Vol. I" (Various) 6/12/11
32. "Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts & Cults" (Jacques Vallee) 6/15/11
33. "Earth Inferno" (Austin Osman Spare) 6/18/11
34. "The Book of Satyrs" (Austin Osman Spare) 6/18/11
35. "A Scanner Darkly" (Philip K. Dick) 6/20/11
36. "Nineteen Seventy Four" (David Peace) 6/21/11
37."Nineteen Seventy Seven" (David Peace) 6/24/11
38. "Nineteen Eighty" (David Peace) 6/28/11
39. "Nineteen Eighty Three" (David Peace) 7/2/11
40. "Q.B.L. or the Bride's Reception" (Frater Achad) 7/7/11
41. "Graves" (Thomas Moore) 7/9/11
42. "The Book of Lies" (Aleister Crowley) 7/13/11
43. "The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy" (Austin Osman Spare) 7/14/11
44. "The Focus of Life" (Austin Osman Spare) 7/16/11
45. "Anathema of Zos" (Austin Osman Spare) 7/16/11
46. "Querelle" (Jean Genet) 7/19/11
47. "Myths of the Near Future" (J.G. Ballard) 7/29/11
48. "Empire Star/Babel-17" (Samuel R. Delany) 8/12/11
49. "The Waves" (Virginia Woolf) 8/19/11
50. "Lost Worlds" (Clark Ashton Smith) 8/26/11
51. "Grimscribe: His Lives & Works" (Thomas Ligotti) 8/28/11 *

*= book I've read at least once in the past

currently reading:

"Nova" (Samuel R. Delany)
"The Great Gatsby" (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

For postitbreakup

2011-08-30T17:01:00.000-07:00

Some Clive Barker quotations on the topic of religion that I enjoy

2011-08-07T14:13:00.000-07:00

From the following site: http://www.clivebarker.info/religion.html

"[If marooned on a desert island] I'd take a crate of videos and one book. I'd take the Bible. Because it's this massive, layered, rich, wise, dark, dangerous, ambiguous masterpiece. It seems to me to be a wonderful ragbag of drug dreams and poetry, history, violence and beauty. It's the single most important source of insight and storytelling I've ever encountered. There isn't a collection of videos, however big the crate, which could offer me compensation for that. In my fiction I am critical of the organisational elements of the Church, yes. I have contempt for many of the corruptions of the Church, and I think that when you value the Bible or the Christian message, it's easy to feel contempt for those who judge themselves worthy of carrying that message, whether it be the Swaggarts of this world or the inhumanities of the Vatican and the way its teachings seem to cause universal pain in the name of love. It's difficult to feel benign towards these populist, very often arrogant, self-centred and corrupt individuals who take upon themselves the duty of controlling the message. The distinction I make between the message-carriers and the message itself is very strong. Priests don't come out very well in my books, but the underlying mythologies - the idea of redemption, the idea of having someone to die in order to save, the idea of non- judgmental love and so on - are themes that come up over and over again in my work. But I don't write cynically about the message. I write cynically about the agents. The vocabulary of the fantastique generally is shot through with religious underpinnings of various kinds. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to realise that, encoded in a lot of fantasy, science fiction and horror are the large problems which once would have vexed theologians. But the anxieties we feel are not addressed from the pulpit any longer. Well, they are addressed from the pulpit, it's just that there's nobody in the pews. So we look elsewhere. The worst thing you can do to children is thrust one particular religious view down their throats. There are only two ways they'll go as a consequence of that: either become indoctrinated and not think for themselves, or respond so negatively to what they've been taught they become perverse and tainted by the guilt that they're turning their backs on this thing, whatever this thing is. Catholicism is obviously the prime villain; you know, the 'once a Catholic' line. I was allowed to think for myself. I'm a believer in the sense that Blake was a believer. I'm a believer in the sense that I take the Bible as something which is available for very private interpretation, and that interpretation may not sit well with conventional interpretations. The material is there for investigation and investigation on an intimate level. Its lessons, its wisdom, its serenity, its good sense, its absurdities and malice - it's very malicious at times - are all part of what makes it remarkable. So I suppose my reading of it means I've ended up as a strange kind of believer."

"Actually the older I get, the more attractive the idea of a Sunday ritual like that becomes. And I'm serious about that. I actually wish I had more belief in the Church. There's a wonderful book by John Betjeman, who did Summoned by Bells. The first poem is about Sunday morning in England, expressing a kind of passion for a very English, and very safe vision of the world. Summoned by Bells expresses the passion for getting up on a Sunday morning and being summoned by that most reassuring of sounds to go and worship. I have a little portion of my perverse soul that has found that profoundly attractive. Doug Winter and I have spoken a lot on this and it has been almost a theme of this convention, a sort of middle-age. I was talking also to Doug Bradley about it and one of the things that I think has happened as I get older, some of the images that I found kind of repulsive as a child or a young man are coming back to me with a fresh power to seduce me. Out of England, where I haven't been in two years, those images come with particular power because I haven't been there for awhile. In Los Angeles if someone were to burn leaves, which is very unusual because it just doesn't happen, if you were to smell that sort of bitter sweet smell of burning dry vegetation I am suddenly a child again in that time of autumn and I feel a sense of longing for that again. When I was a kid, Sunday morning was a very religious time. The sound of church bells on Sunday was always very reassuring. The fact that I only ever went to church a few times in my childhood, and one of them was for a baptism of which I didn't have any choice, it doesn't mean that there wasn't an incredible power with the association. I know that even the Christmas carols and the hymns that I sang as a child, when I think about the very repugnant sentiment of them, had an extraordinary power to move me. It's an association with a feeling of childhood and feelings of security. As I get older I feel them falling away from me. I feel less and less certain of the world and I think I go back to the things that I did feel certain about as a child. Curiously some of the things are things that I believe if I had actually answered the Summons of the Bells and sat and listened to the sermons, I wouldn't be sitting here rhapsodizing about it because I would be bored witless by the experience. But the fact is that I didn't answer. So the answer is; give me another five years and I probably wouldn't be here, I would be at Mass or maybe even serving it, who knows...?"

2011 Reading List Monthly Update: July

2011-07-31T11:22:00.000-07:00

Books completed in July 2011:

"Nineteen Eighty Three" (David Peace) 7/2/11
"Q.B.L. or the Bride's Reception" (Frater Achad) 7/7/11
"Graves" (Thomas Moore) 7/9/11
"The Book of Lies" (Aleister Crowley) 7/13/11
"The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy" (Austin Osman Spare) 7/14/11
"The Focus of Life" (Austin Osman Spare) 7/16/11
"Anathema of Zos" (Austin Osman Spare) 7/16/11
"Querelle" (Jean Genet) 7/19/11
"Myths of the Near Future" (J.G. Ballard) 7/29/11

2011 Reading List total:

1. "Welcome to my World" (Johnny Weir) 1/12/11
2. "Cold Hand in Mine" (Robert Aickman) 1/14/11
3. "The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse" (Lonely Christopher) 1/20/11
4. "Illuminated Shadows" (James Champagne) 1/20/11 *
5. "Eat When You Feel Sad" (Zachary German) 1/23/11
6. "The Marble Index" (James Champagne)
7. "Brigit" (Andrew Champagne) 2/15/11
8. "Gravity's Rainbow" (Thomas Pynchon) 2/25/11
9. "Demons by Daylight" (Ramsey Campbell) 3/4/11
10. "Neuromancer" (William Gibson) 3/7/11 *
11. "Don Quixote" (Kathy Acker) 3/16/11
12. "Snow Crash" (Neal Stephenson) 3/31/11
13. "Shoplifting From American Apparel" (Tao Lin) 4/1/11
14. "Franny and Zooey" (J.D. Salinger) 4/7/11
15. "The Failure" (James Greer) 4/8/11
16. "The Gospel of Anarchy" (Justin Taylor) 4/16/11
17. "Dhalgren" (Samuel R. Delany) 4/21/11
18. "There Is No Year" (Blake Butler) 4/25/11
19. "Star Maker" (Olaf Stapledon) 5/1/11
20. "Death in Venice" (Thomas Mann) 5/3/11
21. "The Celestine Prophecy" (James Redfield) 5/9/11
22. "Selfish, Little: the Annotated Lesley Ann Downey" (Peter Sotos) 5/11/11 *
23. "The Quantity Theory of Insanity" (Will Self) 5/15/11
24. "Principia Discordia" (Malaclypse the Younger) 5/18/11 *
25. "Topology of a Phantom City" (Alain Robbe-Grillet) 5/21/11
26. "The Archaic Revival" (Terence McKenna) 5/23/11
27. "The Wasp Factory" (Iain Banks) 5/27/11
28. "Stories Toto Told Me" (Baron Corvo) 5/29/11
29. "The Oblate of St. Benedict" (J.K. Huysmans) 6/2/11
30. "Ubik" (Philip K. Dick) 6/8/11
31. "Ecpyrosis: The Best of Starfire Vol. I" (Various) 6/12/11
32. "Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts & Cults" (Jacques Vallee) 6/15/11
33. "Earth Inferno" (Austin Osman Spare) 6/18/11
34. "The Book of Satyrs" (Austin Osman Spare) 6/18/11
35. "A Scanner Darkly" (Philip K. Dick) 6/20/11
36. "Nineteen Seventy Four" (David Peace) 6/21/11
37."Nineteen Seventy Seven" (David Peace) 6/24/11
38. "Nineteen Eighty" (David Peace) 6/28/11
39. "Nineteen Eighty Three" (David Peace) 7/2/11
40. "Q.B.L. or the Bride's Reception" (Frater Achad) 7/7/11
41. "Graves" (Thomas Moore) 7/9/11
42. "The Book of Lies" (Aleister Crowley) 7/13/11
43. "The Book of Pleasure: The Psychology of Ecstasy" (Austin Osman Spare) 7/14/11
44. "The Focus of Life" (Austin Osman Spare) 7/16/11
45. "Anathema of Zos" (Austin Osman Spare) 7/16/11
46. "Querelle" (Jean Genet) 7/19/11
47. "Myths of the Near Future" (J.G. Ballard) 7/29/11

*= book I've read at least once in the past

currently reading:

"Empire Star/Babel-17" (Samuel R. Delany)

My "Failed Novels" Folder

2011-07-12T11:20:00.000-07:00

Contents include:

"Slack is Beautiful" (worked on in 2009) 115 handwritten pages + notes [Status: unfinished]

"Poisonville" (worked on in 2002) 114 handwritten pages + notes [Status: unfinished]

"The Beta Sequence" (notes only) 2006 & 2008

"Blasphemous Rumors" (worked on in 2006) 25 typed pages + notes [Status: unfinished]

"Andy Warhol Novel" (worked on in 2007) 60 typed pages + notes [Status: unfinished]

"Subhuman" (worked on in 2007/2008) 151 typed pages + notes [Status: complete, but in desperate need of revision/rewriting]

"Jormungand" (notes only) 2010

* * * *

Slack is Beautiful was an attempt to write an airy romantic comedy in the Reality Bites/Friends vein.

Poisonville was a crime novel that was my attempt to take the experience of playing a Grand Theft Auto video game and turning it into a novel.

The Beta Sequence was never a serious project: it was meant to be a spoof of the type of novel written by authors such as Robert Ludlum, Dan Brown, and Jon Land.

Blasphemous Rumors was to have been a murder mystery set at a fictitious college campus in upstate New York.

Subhuman was a short novel that revolved around my experiences as a bookseller. I still hope to rework it into something publishable one day. I'm just too lazy to rewrite the parts that need to be rewritten. But I feel with some tighter editing I could get something worthwhile from it.

Jormungand was to have been my Wes Anderson novel, about a cursed man who embarked on a journey aboard a submarine to try to find the legendary sea serpent Jormungand, in the hope that imbibing some blood from the monster would dispel his curse. At one point I did type out 30 or so pages for this project but sadly the document is now lost.

The Warhol novel is in development hell but I still hope to finish it someday.

Not included in this folder are my notes for So Below, a project I was working on in mid-2008 that was to have been my La-Bas. Mainly as I seem to have misplaced them.

WIP: Opening paragraph of "Drawings of Patient O.T.", 1st draft

2011-06-18T09:32:00.000-07:00

“Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.” So begins “The Picture in the House,” a short story written by H.P. Lovecraft on Dec. 12, 1920. It’s a statement that has resonated with me ever since I first stumbled across it while flipping through the 1985 corrected sixth printing of Arkham House’s The Dunwich Horrors and Others, a book I found on my father’s bookcase when I was a child, a book with a green dust jacket and an Raymond Bayless illustration of Cthulhu emerging from his sunken tomb at R’lyeh. I can think of many people that Lovecraft’s statement could be applied to, people I’ve known in my own life in fact. Years ago, when I was attending high school at the city of Los Diablos, I knew a boy who was utterly obsessed with some old and abandoned chemical factory, an obsession which eventually led to madness and suicide. And after I graduated college and moved back to my hometown, which is the city of Thundermist in northern Rhode Island, I made friends with a gay man my own age who, like my friend from high school, was also haunted by a building, which in this case was an old church called St. Durtal’s. Even I have found myself drawn like a moth to a strange building: Kafka’s Clinic, an old abandoned mental hospital. It was there that I first came across the drawings of Patient O.T.

From the Vault: Snapshots From my Youth Pt. 1 (1980-1991)

2011-06-14T08:56:00.000-07:00

This is a very young picture of me... I'm probably about a year old or thereabouts here. It kind of amazes me how happy I was during my childhood, and how often I'm smiling in many of these pictures. But then again, my childhood was happy, so what did I have to be depressed about?

I think I'm around two years old here. There's probably more body fat on my face in this picture than I have on my entire body today.

On the beach in 1982.

Holding my beloved Star Wars Rancor toy. Years later, when I was studying ventriloquism during my high school years, I would employ this same Rancor as a sort of ventriloquist's dummy, as it had a movable mouth.

Opening presents on Christmas of 1984. Kermit the Frog was one of my childhood heroes. Though my favorite Muppet was Uncle Deadly, the Phantom of the Muppet Show. My very favorite episode of the Muppet Show was probably the Star Wars episode, followed by the show where Vincent Price guest starred.

My mother reading to me on Christmas of 1984.

Along with Rocky Point Amusement Park, Kings Castle Land (in Whitman, Massachusetts) was my other favorite amusement park, even though I think I only went there twice. I read somewhere once that the place closed down in 1993. Here I pose on top of a fallen giant.

Another picture of me at Kings Castle Land, posing next to a big frog. I seem to recall this amusement park also had two giant dragons that belched flames.

Stuff I received for my sixth birthday in June 1986. I can spot some Star Wars toys (including Jabba the Hutt and the Wampa snow monster), Gumby and Pokey toys, and the Madballs toy known as Oculus Orbus, which probably sparked my fascination with eyeballs.

Christmas 1986. On the television set is a manger, that my parents still set up every year during the holiday season. On the bookshelf behind me I can read a few of the titles my mother owned: The Exorcist, The Bell Jar, Carrie, and, uh, Dallas.

Graduating from kindergarten in 1986, posing with a nun, who I think was one of my teachers, though I forget her name. Was it she who taught me about death? For kindergarten my parents sent me to a Catholic school, but it was kind of expensive so the following year they enrolled me at Bernon Heights elementary school, a public school.

Me posing next to a large shark poster at Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut, sometime in the early-to-mid 1980's. As a child, I was obsessed with sharks, and owned many shark t-shirts and stuffed animals. My favorite stuffed animal was a shark hand puppet that I named "Shark Puppet." In this picture it looks like I'm about to start busting out some rap dance moves.

Smiling for the camera in June, 1987.

My 7th birthday party, on June 17th, 1987. Here I pose behind my cake, the infamous Stay Puft Marshmallow Man cake. The theme that year was Ghostbusters, which was one of my favorite films. Other films I enjoyed in my youth wereThe Dark Crystal, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, Godzilla, and the Star Wars trilogy.

Opening presents at my 7th birthday party. In this picture, I'm unwrapping the Ghostbusters computer game for the Commodore 64, while my father and two of my brothers look on.

Posing with some of my birthday swag. For some reason I'm holding my two favorite stuffed animals in this picture, even though I had gotten them in a previous year.

More posing.

A close-up of the famous Stay Puft Marshmallow Man cake.

When I was a child, Halloween was, after Christmas, my favorite holiday. I just loved dressing up. My mother's a quilter, and she would often hand make costumes for my brothers and I. The above picture, taken on Halloween in 1987, showcases my favorite costume she made for me, that of a shark. It won second place in the school costume contest that day.

A side view of the shark costume.

Posing with my three younger brothers on Halloween. That year we apparently all dressed up as our favorite animals at that time.

June 17th, 1988: my eight birthday party. The theme that year was Pillsbury Doughboy, oddly enough.

Another picture from Mystic Aquarium, this one taken in 1988. This time I'm posing next to an actual shark, who doesn't look entirely pleased. As usual I'm holding my two favorite stuffed animals, Shark Puppet and Sammy.

October 1988. I'm in the backyard of our old house (my family and I moved into a new one the following year), showing off a praying mantis that had crawled onto my t-shirt. Aside from my obsession with sharks, I also had a huge interest in bugs and insect life in general, with the exception of bees.

This is me receiving First Communion on May 14, 1989, at Our Lady Queen of Martyrs Church (where I also had my Confirmation, in 1996). The priest in this picture was the church's pastor at that time, Father Bill. I think this is one of the only times in my life where I've ever worn a suit. Below is a certificate I got marking the occasion:

This picture was taken in December 1990, when I was in the fifth grade. During my grade school years, I acted in two plays. One of them was entitled The Giggling Goblin, where I played a supporting character named "Dr. Dracula." The second one was Old King Cole, where I played the lead (and titular) character. In this photo I'm seated in the center, clad in a black cape and wearing a crown that was probably made from construction paper. The only thing I can recall from the experience was a realization that I had no interest in pursuing acting.

This was taken in June of 1991. That's me holding my pet lizard, Spiky, who I ended up immortalizing in a short story I wrote for school the following year (a story I posted on this blog not too long ago: http://onyxglossary.blogspot.com/2011/05/from-vault-adventures-of-spiky.html)

Christmas 1991, holding up my notorious Steve Urkel t-shirt, which I actually wore in public. That might explain why I got picked on in school. I actually dressed as Steve Urkel for Halloween of that same year, but out of respect for the sanity of all right-thinking readers of this blog I won't post that picture.

To be continued...

2011 Reading List Monthly Update: May

2011-05-31T09:27:00.000-07:00

Books completed in May 2011:

"Star Maker" (Olaf Stapledon) 5/1/11
"Death in Venice" (Thomas Mann) 5/3/11
"The Celestine Prophecy" (James Redfield) 5/9/11
"Selfish, Little: the Annotated Lesley Ann Downey" (Peter Sotos) 5/11/11 *
"The Quantity Theory of Insanity" (Will Self) 5/15/11
"Principia Discordia" (Malaclypse the Younger) 5/18/11 *
"Topology of a Phantom City" (Alain Robbe-Grillet) 5/21/11
"The Archaic Revival" (Terence McKenna) 5/23/11
"The Wasp Factory" (Iain Banks) 5/27/11
"Stories Toto Told Me" (Baron Corvo) 5/29/11

2011 Reading List total:

1. "Welcome to my World" (Johnny Weir) 1/12/11
2. "Cold Hand in Mine" (Robert Aickman) 1/14/11
3. "The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse" (Lonely Christopher) 1/20/11
4. "Illuminated Shadows" (James Champagne) 1/20/11 *
5. "Eat When You Feel Sad" (Zachary German) 1/23/11
6. "The Marble Index" (James Champagne)
7. "Brigit" (Andrew Champagne) 2/15/11
8. "Gravity's Rainbow" (Thomas Pynchon) 2/25/11
9. "Demons by Daylight" (Ramsey Campbell) 3/4/11
10. "Neuromancer" (William Gibson) 3/7/11 *
11. "Don Quixote" (Kathy Acker) 3/16/11
12. "Snow Crash" (Neal Stephenson) 3/31/11
13. "Shoplifting From American Apparel" (Tao Lin) 4/1/11
14. "Franny and Zooey" (J.D. Salinger) 4/7/11
15. "The Failure" (James Greer) 4/8/11
16. "The Gospel of Anarchy" (Justin Taylor) 4/16/11
17. "Dhalgren" (Samuel R. Delany) 4/21/11
18. "There Is No Year" (Blake Butler) 4/25/11
19. "Star Maker" (Olaf Stapledon) 5/1/11
20. "Death in Venice" (Thomas Mann) 5/3/11
21. "The Celestine Prophecy" (James Redfield) 5/9/11
22. "Selfish, Little: the Annotated Lesley Ann Downey" (Peter Sotos) 5/11/11 *
23. "The Quantity Theory of Insanity" (Will Self) 5/15/11
24. "Principia Discordia" (Malaclypse the Younger) 5/18/11 *
25. "Topology of a Phantom City" (Alain Robbe-Grillet) 5/21/11
26. "The Archaic Revival" (Terence McKenna) 5/23/11
27. "The Wasp Factory" (Iain Banks) 5/27/11
28. "Stories Toto Told Me" (Baron Corvo) 5/29/11

*= book I've read at least once in the past

currently reading:

"Ecpyrosis: The Best of Starfire Volume One"
"The Oblate of St. Benedict" (J.K. Huysmans)

From the Vault: The Adventures of Spiky

2011-05-30T08:25:00.000-07:00

What follows is a short story I wrote as a student in the sixth grade, during my first year at Woonsocket Junior High School. This story, which was written in January of 1992, consists of 8 pages of text (written out in cursive on lined paper) and 7 pages of illustrations (done in colored markers), along with a title page. Apparently the powers that be felt that my story was good enough to win me that year's "Young Author Award" for my grade. It was the second time I had received such an award, the first time being when I was in second grade, for a contemporary re-imagining of the Frosty the Snowman story. The story that won me an award in the sixth grade, and which I now reproduce here, is entitled The Adventures of Spiky. The setting is my parent's house (where I still live), and the hero is Spiky, who was my pet lizard at the time (see the notes following the story for more details on this). The supporting cast was also modeled after pets that shared our home at that time. So, without further ado, here then is the worldwide debut of The Adventures of Spiky... (click on the illustrations if you want to see them in greater detail)

The Adventures of Spiky
James Champagne

(January 1992: written in the sixth grade)

* * * *

It was a beautiful day in the Champagne house. The sun shone brightly on Spiky’s aquarium. Spiky was James Champagne’s lizard. He had gotten Spiky for his birthday. In Spiky’s aquarium, there was a heat rock, a water bowl, a false lizard toy, a glass dinosaur, and a big wooden stick.

Spiky had a tannish, brownish color. Around his neck was a black piece of skin. He also had a spiky tail.

James came in the room, holding a box of crickets. “Food time, Spiky!” he said. He gave Spiky two crickets. They were big.

“Hello!” said the crickets.

“Hello, lunch and dinner!” said Spiky, drooling.

“Wait! You can’t eat us! Not when there is a whole house to explore!” cried the crickets.

“What?” asked Spiky, climbing up his stick.

“Oh, you really should enjoy the house,” they agreed. “The next time James opens the aquarium door, hop out!” said the crickets.

“Well, okay, but just for this once!” said Spiky, uncertainly.

The next day, James walked up to Spiky’s aquarium with the box of crickets. He opened the little door. Jump! Spiky hopped out. “Hey, get back here, Spiky!” cried James, but Spiky was long gone.

“Wow, this place is huge!” said Spiky. He crawled to the kitchen. All the furniture loomed over him. He found a piece of yarn and climbed up to the counter. Then he hopped into a bowl of cold soup.

“Brrrr! It’s cold in here!” muttered Spiky. “Now, how will I get off the counter?”

Then he saw a spoon. He climbed on one end of the spoon, and threw a meatball on the other end. Spring! He got sprung into the cat’s food bowl. What bad timing! Two cats, Rusty and Panda appeared.

“I’m outta here!” cried Spiky. He ran away, but the cats were still chasing him. He ran into the den. The cats were still following him. He ran faster. Soon he was at Hamton’s (the family hamster) cage.

“Can I come in?” asked Spiky.

“Sure!” said Hampton. He opened his cage’s door, and Spiky ran in. The cats gave up and walked away.

“Who, may I ask, are you?” asked Hampton.

“I am Spiky, the lizard who lives in the parlor. I decided to have a vacation, and those cats started chasing me.”

“Well, you can stay here as long as you want,” said Hampton.

Spiky enjoyed it in Hampton’s cage. It reminded him of his own aquarium. Soon he was homesick. So he made a plan. “When everyone is asleep, I will sneak back into my aquarium,” he thought. Soon it was midnight. Everyone was asleep. “Here’s my chance!” said Spiky.

He sneaked out of Hampton’s cage and crawled away. He was back in the kitchen. Everything was dark and scary. “Gulp,” said Spiky. He edged into the hallway. Okay, now he was at the door to the bathroom. He was almost at the door to the parlor! Just a little more, a little more…

Boom! Peter, the big black dog, burst into the room! He ran at Spiky. “Grrrrr!” he said. Spiky scrambled down the hallway, but the dog was still following him. So he ran into the basement and shut the door. Phew! He was safe! He crawled down the stairs.

Then, Rusty and Panda appeared. Uh oh! Spiky had forgotten that Rusty and Panda slept down there at night. Spiky ran up onto the pool table. The cats followed, but they slipped on the balls.

Spiky ran into one of the pockets in the pool table. He turned and saw an 8 ball rolling at him! Spiky ran off the pool table and climbed on the boards on the roof.

“Phew!” said Spiky. He crawled along the roof. Suddenly, he stepped right into a spider web.

“Uh oh!” said Spiky as a big spider crawled at him. What could he do? He couldn’t move, and the spider was coming closer! There was just one thing he could do! So he hissed. “Hisssssssssss!” hissed Spiky. The spider was so startled he accidentally cut Spiky’s ropes. Spiky ran past the confused spider and hopped from the roof on to the stairs!

Poor Spiky was so tired when he got upstairs, he just wanted to get in his aquarium. Then, he felt dog breath on his neck again! It was Peter the dog!

Spiky quickly jumped on the dog. He grappled the dog’s collar with his claws. The dog got all riled up and ran toward the basement. Spiky let go of the collar and crawled on the dog’s face. The dog went into a frenzy. Spiky hung on for dear life. The dog ran up the stairs, into Mom and Dad’s room. “Who’s there!” asked Dad. “It’s the dog!” cried Mom. “And Spiky’s on top of him! James will be so happy!” So they put Spiky into his aquarium.

The next morning, James woke up and walked downstairs. There, to his amazement, he saw Spiky in his aquarium. “Spiky, I’m so glad to see you!” Then he called Mom, Dad, and his three brothers, Tommy, Billy, and Andrew. They all had a small party. That night, comfortable in his cage again, Spiky walked over to the crickets.

“Did you have a good vacation?” they asked.

“Gulp!” went Spiky. Now those troublesome crickets were in his stomach! He happily fell asleep.

* * * *

NOTES:

Re-reading this story after all these years was a somewhat bittersweet experience for me, seeing as how all of the animals depicted within, such as my beloved cat Rusty, died many years ago. I find it odd that I decided to use Peter the dog as the story's antagonist, as in real-life Peter was perhaps one of the gentlest and easy-going dogs I've ever encountered (to this day, my mother often refers to him as "St. Peter" in fact). I wish I had spent more time on the illustrations: I was taking advanced art classes at the time, though you wouldn't know it from looking at the drawings (the rendition of the spider web in particular is painfully crude). Having said that, I like the drawing that showcases Spiky launching himself into the air via spoon and meatball, quite MacGyver that.

Sadly, poor Spiky passed away a few months after this story was written. His decline and death were hard for me as, unlike the cats and dogs of the house, he was my own personal pet. My mother and I tried to get him back to health by force-feeding him crickets (a confession: I never did quite feel comfortable feeding him live crickets in general, but that's the only thing he would eat), and during his last days I would spend hours sitting by his aquarium just to be by his side. When he died, my family actually sent me a sympathy card in the mail (though really, I suppose they could have just given it to me), telling me what a good friend I had been to Spiky and how he would always be with me in spirit. I had totally forgotten about this card until I found it a few days ago in one of my old shoe boxes that I use to house personal belongings. In any events, Spiky's memory lives on. Below is a picture of him:

From the Vault: Halloween Time (poem)

2011-05-28T07:54:00.000-07:00

The following poem was composed when I was a student at Bernon Heights Elementary School, probably when I was in the second or third grade. It won some kind of school-wide poetry contest that was being held then, and I and the rest of the winners had to go down to a local radio station and read our poem on-air, which was, needless to say, an interesting experience.

"Halloween Time"
by James Champagne

It's Halloween, and the Ghostly Queen,
is sending out monsters all slimy and green.
On the streets are headless goons,
and a wicked witch flies past the moon.
Jack-o-lantern's eyes are bright,
as people run in terror or fright.
A ghost goes and haunts a house,
scaring away a giant mouse.
The werewolves run and bite people they've never met,
causing many horrible deaths.
Vampires bite people on the necks,
a giant frog says "Blech!"
But out comes the sun, the monsters run,
and Halloween is all done.

* * * *

Some tortured rhyming aside, I kind of like the Edward Gorey-ish vibe of this piece, and it interests me that so many years later I'm still mining the same horrific/monster imagery that so obsessed me when I was a child. Everyday is Halloween indeed!

From the Vault: My 1992 Summer Reading List!

2011-05-27T17:19:00.000-07:00

1. How to eat Fried Worms (Thomas Rockwell)
2. Batman Returns (movie novelization)
3. Chicken Trek (Stephen Manes)
4. The Fright Face Contest (Stephen Mooser)
5. Rats (Pat Hutchins)
6. Slim Down Camp (Stephen Manes)
7. Revenge of the Nerd (John McNamara)
8. Wally (Judre Walkoff)
9. Be an Interplanetary Spy (Seth McEvoy)
10. Make Four Million Dollars by Next Thursday (Stephen Manes)
11. The Curse of the Egyptian Mummy (Pat Hutchins)
12. Monster of the Year (Stephen Mooser)
13. The Pink Panther Adventures in Z Land (David L. Harrison)
14. Star Wars: the Glove of Darth Vader (Paul Davids)
15. Doors to Doom (Bill McCay)
16. Koopa Capers (Bill McCay)
17. Pipe Down! (Clyde Bosco)
18. Unjust Desserts (Matt Wayne)
19. The Crystal Trap (Matt Wayne)
20. Brain Drain (Matt Wayne)
21. Leaping Lizards (Clyde Bosco)
22. Flown the Koopa (Matt Wayne)
23. Star Wars: Zorba the Hutt's Revenge (Paul Davids)
24. Star Wars: the Lost City of the Jedi (Paul Davids)
25. Hollywood Dinosaur (Daniel Cohen)
26. Honey I Blew up the Kid (Todd Shasser)
27. The Escape of the Plant That ate Dirty Socks (Nancy McArthur)
28. Steve Urkel's Super-Cool Guide to Success (Billy Aronson)
29. Monster Mix-up (Bill McCay)
30. The Shadow Prince (Matt Wayne)
31. Monster Maker (Nicholas Fish)
32. Crazy Mixed-up Valentines (Stephen Mooser)

-The spellings of the last names of a few of these authors might be incorrect.

-Entries #15-22, along with #30, were from the Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda "choose your own adventures" series.

-I seem to recall really loving "The Curse of the Egyptian Mummy," to the extent that I just ordered a used copy of it off Amazon a few minutes ago, though I forget most of the content. "Chicken Trek" was pretty good also as I recall.

-Six years after this list and I'd be reading "Naked Lunch." Proof that it's a thin line that separates "Steve Urkel's Super-Cool Guide to Success" with avant-garde counter-cultural fiction.

2011 Reading List Monthly Update: April

2011-04-30T11:56:00.000-07:00

Books completed in April 2011:

"Shoplifting From American Apparel" (Tao Lin) 4/1/11
"Franny and Zooey" (J.D. Salinger) 4/7/11
"The Failure" (James Greer) 4/8/11
"The Gospel of Anarchy" (Justin Taylor) 4/16/11
"Dhalgren" (Samuel R. Delany) 4/21/11
"There Is No Year" (Blake Butler) 4/25/11

2011 Reading List total:

1. "Welcome to my World" (Johnny Weir) 1/12/11
2. "Cold Hand in Mine" (Robert Aickman) 1/14/11
3. "The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse" (Lonely Christopher) 1/20/11
4. "Illuminated Shadows" (James Champagne) 1/20/11 *
5. "Eat When You Feel Sad" (Zachary German) 1/23/11
6. "The Marble Index" (James Champagne)
7. "Brigit" (Andrew Champagne) 2/15/11
8. "Gravity's Rainbow" (Thomas Pynchon) 2/25/11
9. "Demons by Daylight" (Ramsey Campbell) 3/4/11
10. "Neuromancer" (William Gibson) 3/7/11 *
11. "Don Quixote" (Kathy Acker) 3/16/11
12. "Snow Crash" (Neal Stephenson) 3/31/11
13. "Shoplifting From American Apparel" (Tao Lin) 4/1/11
14. "Franny and Zooey" (J.D. Salinger) 4/7/11
15. "The Failure" (James Greer) 4/8/11
16. "The Gospel of Anarchy" (Justin Taylor) 4/16/11
17. "Dhalgren" (Samuel R. Delany) 4/21/11
18. "There Is No Year" (Blake Butler) 4/25/11

*= book I've read at least once in the past

currently reading:

"Star Maker" (Olaf Stapledon)

Mini-book review: Blake Butler's "There Is No Year"

2011-04-25T08:52:00.001-07:00

Blake Butler frustrates me. While undeniably a talented young writer, with a knack for creating both disturbing imagery and evocative and atmospheric sentences, I've yet to read one of his books and end up walking away feeling 100% satisfied. I came across his "novel-in-stories" Scorch Atlas during the summer of 2010, while vacationing with my family in Philadelphia, and when I first began it I thought it was one of the most incredible apocalyptic novels I had read in awhile, a stunning and even breathtaking murky glimpse at a world in which all logic had suddenly gone out the window, a world suffering through a number of surrealistic apocalypses, with Butler, like some sort of necromantic magician, conjuring up scene after scene of dazed people numbly trying to cope with a new civilization in which everything was rotting and decaying, a sort of textual recreation of Max Ernst's Europe After the Rain, if you will. At least, that's what I thought about the first 100 pages: the 52 pages that follow seemed to jettison the horror and clarity of what came before them and in their place was just a lot of free form imagery and tired stabs at experimental writing (for example, one page consisted of a few terse sentences interspersed with hundreds of parentheses repeated over and over again). In the end, it just wound up leaving me feeling disappointed, a missed opportunity.

I kind of feel the same way about Butler's newest novel (and major publishing debut), There Is No Year (Harper Perennial, 2011). Like Scorch Atlas, there isn't much in the way of a plot or a story. The novel can best be summed up in this manner: in a world suffused by a sort of vaguely described light, a father, mother and their sickly son move into a haunted house and weird things happen. It's a flimsy set-up that somehow Butler manages to stretch out for 400 pages, whereas I feel it probably would have made a more effective novella or short story (as it is, the whole "house-within-a-house"/"house that's larger on the inside than it is from the outside" feels like it's been done to death before anyway: Borges tackled the same theme in a lot of his short fiction, as did J.G. Ballard in stories such as "The Endless Space" and "Report on an Unidentified Space Station"). I thought the first 230 pages or so were quite good, thinking that maybe this was how a book like Lunar Park should have been written (another novel dealing with a family experiencing weird phenomena in a house that may be haunted, albeit told in a more conventional, less flashy style). But after that tedium started setting in as the book just dragged on and on before "ending" with not much of a bang. While the book certainly looks great, with its gray pages and its blurry photographs, this just seems to serve as a mask to cover up the "been there, done that" nature of Butler's themes. It doesn't help matters that the main characters in question (none of which are named) are such abstract stick figures that it's hard to really give a damn about them and the bizarre things that happen to them, and after awhile all of the unrelenting weirdness starts to become banal and routine, all of it written in Butler's blank style. I'm kind of curious as to how he feels about his own work: there seems, to me, to be a lack of passion or emotion present.

This isn't to say that the book isn't enjoyable, as like in Scorch Atlas there are some effective and disturbing scenes and images, such as a scene where the son plays a video game that finds him trapped in a level that never ends. But as the book goes on these interesting scenes start to become few and far between, and it just doesn't seem to add up or cohere into a successful whole. If one views There Is No Year as an illogical and choppy nightmare set in the form of a novel, one might be tempted to see it as a literary success, but as a friend of mine (Chris Stamm) recently noted in his own review of the book in question, "one man’s bad dream will almost always be the same man’s dull tale, no matter the amount of typesetting tomfoolery."

Update

2011-03-26T19:33:00.000-07:00

It seems I've been updating this blog infrequently as of late. Part of the reason for that is that I haven't been doing much writing recently. I do have a big project planned for the future, but it's still in the planning stages. There are maps that need to be drawn, timelines and bloodlines that need to be created. More details to come.

In the meantime, I have a tumblr now: http://randommonsterencounters.tumblr.com/

The Demons in the Fresco

2011-03-09T13:34:00.000-08:00

When one is a writer of fiction, one must always keep the eyes and ears open at all times for new ideas and sources of inspiration. Really, I've found it's almost impossible to turn the writer "off." I recall reading some years ago how, when Neil Gaiman's first child was being born, the writer in him kept bugging him to memorize all of the details, in case he ever wanted to use the memory of the event as material for a novel. It's something I can relate to, and I'm always looking out for fresh sources of inspiration. Sometimes I find these ideas in the most unexpected places (one of my most recent stories, "The Yellow Notebook," was inspired by the schizophrenic contents of a very odd yellow notebook I saw a customer flipping through at work late one evening during a closing shift). My most recent short story, "The Demons in the Fresco," was inspired by another story, this one concerning a fresco in one of my city's many churches.

The city of Woonsocket, my hometown, doesn't have a whole lot going for it, but it does have some quite beautiful old churches, many of which were built in the late 19th century by the French-Canadian immigrants who flocked to the city in great numbers when it was first founded in the hopes of landing jobs in its burgeoning textile industry (I myself am descended from these aforementioned French-Canadians). Last summer I began researching many of the old churches and cemeteries of my hometown, including one St. Ann's Church. Having been raised as a Catholic, I've never been quite able to exorcise my appreciation for Christian art and literature, the pomp and ritual of the Liturgy, or my love for many of the old churches associated with that religion. Although I'm exceedingly liberal on social issues, when it comes to ecclesiastical architecture I'm very orthodox and I don't really care for modern churches at all. St. Ann's Church is a real gem: it's located right next to the building where my therapist's office is located, and even though the church was closed by the Diocese of Providence in the year 2000 these days one can still tour the church on Sunday, as it is currently maintained by a non-religious affiliated, non-profit corporation known as the St. Ann's Arts & Cultural Center, who are dedicated to restoring and preserving the church. I'm kind of sad that I never really attended Mass at this church during my childhood, as it really is quite beautiful... though I think I may have attended a funeral Mass for a relative at one point in the mid-to-late 1990's.

Prof. Guido Nincheri

The church itself is 200 feet long and 118 feet wide, built on a granite block foundation, its main body constructed of light-colored brick with cement stone trimmings. Like many old churches, its built in the form of a large Roman cross, in the Modern French Renaissance style. Its architecture is Romanesque in design, inspired by the 16th century architects Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola (who is perhaps best known for his Jesuit Church of the Gesù in Rome, the interior of which clearly influenced that of St. Ann's) and Andrea Palladio. The roof of the church is covered with slate and copper trimming, while the front is flanked by two 160 foot tall towers, each of which is topped by an eight foot tall copper gilded cross (the tower on the Locust Street side had a belfry which housed three giant bells). Construction on it began in 1914, and it was opened to the public in 1918. Over the years it was gradually added to: between the years 1923-1925 40 stain-glass windows were added to the church, and between April of 1941 and the Fall of 1948 the interior of the church was painted by an Italian hunchback named Prof. Guido Nincheri, who ended up painting the entire church using the buon fresco technique. He ended up doing over 200 different fresco paintings for the church, featuring over 600 characters.

This is what you see when you first enter the church nave. Pictures don't really do justice to how large the inside of this church is. It's almost dizzying, really, and in terms of square footing its interior is actually slightly larger than that of the Sistine Chapel. In its day the church could hold 1,300 people, and the ceiling vaults are over 65 feet high. And everywhere one looks is Prof. Guido Nincheri's art, which illustrates scenes from both the Old and New Testament of the Holy Bible. In effect, to gaze around this church's interior is to look at one of the world's largest illustrated bibles. The church's art tells a story: it's a building you can read.

I first took a tour of St. Ann's in mid-summer 2010, then again in October of that same year (the second time to jot down notes and take some pictures). Both times the tour's guide told me some very interesting information about the stories behind the frescoes. Consider the above fresco, "The Original Sin," depicting the Serpent tempting Adam & Eve to eat forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge in the Graden of Eden. This fresco can be found in the ceiling arch of the church's south transept (like most of the church's ceiling art you have to crane your neck to see it), and the guide told us how parishioners, back in the day, had objected to Adam and Eve's nudity. To appease the philistines, Prof. Nincheri had added a few strategically placed leaves to the fresco. However, he supposedly flew into a rage when the pastor requested further leaves be added, to the extent that he demolished the scaffolding and stated that if the St. Ann's parishioners wished to further cover up Adam and Eve's nudity, they could do it themselves! Apparently students of the church's school were forbidden to gaze up at the "racy" Adam & Eve fresco, and those caught doing so by nuns were punished in class on Monday morning. Some clever boys would smuggle in little pieces of glass or mirrors which they would then use to secretly admire the artwork. The guide also mentioned how the church was supposedly haunted, and that female voices could sometimes be heard whispering in the choir loft, which delighted me to no end, given my love of the supernatural and things that go bump in the night.

By far the church's largest and most impressive fresco is the one painted within the large central dome located on the ceiling above the church's crossing, entitled "The Last Judgment." What makes this piece of art so interesting is it's one of the only frescoes in the church that depicts demons (angels, on the other hand, are in abundance: over 400 of them can be seen depicted in the stain-glass windows, the frescoes, on the ceiling, the walls, and the arches). The three demons in question are at the bottom of the fresco. Two of them have faces that can clearly be seen. The guide mentioned how many of the Biblical figures and angels in the frescoes were modeled after real-life parishioners, who would pose for the artist for 50 cents and a peanut butter sandwich. The St. Ann's Arts & Cultural Center have managed to figure out which fresco characters were modeled on real-life parishioners... with the exception of the demons in the fresco. The story goes that one day in the mid 1940's Prof. Nincheri visited a nun's seventh grade class and asked her to show him who she felt were the two most wicked & mischievous boys in the class. It was supposedly these two boys who served as the models for the demons, though to this day the identity of the two boys is unknown, and even though the St. Ann's Arts & Cultural Center placed an ad in a local newspaper a couple years back asking if the models would identify themselves, no one stepped forward to admit it. It is one of the unsolved mysteries of the church.

detail of the demons in question

Naturally, once I heard that tale, I thought, "Man, that sounds like the perfect set-up for a horror story." So I began doing tons of research into the church. I started working on the story in early January 2010 and finished it on the last day of February. That's the first draft... now I just have to type it out (groan). The finished result is kind of a cross between H.P. Lovecraft's short story "Pickman's Model" and J.K. Huysmans' novel The Cathedral, and it's dedicated to the Johnny Dixon horror novels of John Bellairs, which I read voraciously in grade school: the Dixon mysteries were aimed at younger audiences and were steeped in an atmosphere of Catholicism, even though Bellairs himself was an atheist. Of the many short stories I've written over the years, this one by far was the most difficult for me to write, and at 40 pages is almost a novella! I ended up changing some details though: in my story the city of Woonsocket becomes the City of Thundermist, while the church is renamed St. Durtal's Church (another nod to Huysmans). Having said that, aside from a few minor details and cosmetic changes, the church described in my story is pretty much St. Ann's Church.

Further photos:

St. Ann's Church, seen from a distance.

This is what it looks like when driving to St. Ann's Church. The building in the immediate foreground and to the left is where I see my therapist. His office looks out directly onto the church itself.

A photograph of the rectory side of St. Ann's Church, where the large stain-glass window of the north transept can clearly be seen.

A look towards the main entrance of the church. The large frescoes on the ceiling of the nave depicts scenes from the ministry of Jesus in the Gospels, including his baptism by John the Baptist, his transfiguration on the mountain, the feeding of the 5000, the agony in the garden, and the descent of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. Directly above the doors leading into the foyer is the supposedly haunted choir loft.

The church's sanctuary. The artwork in the dome above the sanctuary depicts scenes from the life of St. Ann herself.

The south transept (also known as its "Locust Street side" due to the fact that this side of the church is flanked by a street called Locust Street).

The church's north transept (its "rectory side").

Picture of a detail of the Jonah fresco. The caption mentions how it represents the beauty of man. I'll say... dude's built like Taylor Lautner. Can't blame the whale for swallowing him.

Here's a link to the webpage maintained by the St. Ann's Arts & Cultural Center: http://stannartsctr.org/default.aspx (click on the "Facility" tab if you want to have a virtual tour of the church). Those interested in further information should check out the book Towers of Faith and Family: St. Ann's Church; Woonsocket, Rhode Island, 1890 - 1990, which was edited by Paul A. Bourget and published by St. Ann's Church itself. A few of the pictures in this blog entry come from that book: the rest of the photographs were taken by myself.

2011 Reading List Monthly Update: February

2011-02-28T10:07:00.000-08:00

Books completed in February 2011:

"Brigit" (Andrew Champagne) 2/15/11
"Gravity's Rainbow" (Thomas Pynchon) 2/25/11

2011 Reading List total:

1. "Welcome to my World" (Johnny Weir) 1/12/11
2. "Cold Hand in Mine" (Robert Aickman) 1/14/11
3. "The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse" (Lonely Christopher) 1/20/11
4. "Illuminated Shadows" (James Champagne) 1/20/11 *
5. "Eat When You Feel Sad" (Zachary German) 1/23/11
6. "The Marble Index" (James Champagne)
7. "Brigit" (Andrew Champagne) 2/15/11
8. "Gravity's Rainbow" (Thomas Pynchon) 2/25/11

*= book I've read at least once in the past

currently reading:

"Demons by Daylight" (Ramsey Campbell)

Mini-book review: Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow"

2011-02-26T08:59:00.000-08:00

For many years now, I've desired to read Thomas Pynchon's classic 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow, which I believe I first purchased maybe in the year 2005. Over the years I've tried to read it a few times, but was never able to make it past the first 100 pages or so (unsurprising, as it's considered by many to be a difficult, almost unreadable book). But recently I finally finished it. It's kind of hard to summarize a novel this large in one mini-review (after all, the book is 760 pages long and features a cast of well over 400 characters, many of whom vanish just as quickly as they appear). But I'll take a stab at it.

The novel takes place over a period from Christmas season 1944 to September of 1945, though there are flashbacks to earlier eras. The action takes place mainly in Europe during the closing days of World War II, and the book is divided into 4 parts (the longest of which is part 3, which is around 336 pages). The book doesn't have all that much of a plot, and what little plot it does have doesn't start to kick in until over 200 pages into the book. The story revolves around a promiscuous (and somewhat paranoid) United States Army lieutenant named Tyrone Slothrop who is stationed in London. Various military organizations (including one dubbed "The White Visitation," which consists of a number of nutty psychics, mediums and occultists), gradually notice that at locations where Slothrop has sex with woman, a V-2 rocket lands at that same spot a few days later. Slothrop begins to fall under surveillance from these aforementioned organizations, and eventually finds himself racing through "The Zone" (Pynchon's name for lawless postwar Europe), trying to avoid a shadowy conspiracy he sees forming all around himself (the people behind this conspiracy usually being classified simply as "They" or "Them") while at the same time trying to unlock the secrets of a mysterious weapon called the "Schwarzgerät" that is to be installed in a rocket with the serial number "00000." As the book progresses, things become increasingly hallucinatory: an octopus named Grigori attacks a female bather, one chapter is written from the perspective of a sentient light bulb named Byron, characters take a trip to what appears to be Hell, and so on.

Like most of Pynchon's novels, the characters have very colorful and inventive names (such as Milton Gloaming, Ernest Pudding, and Miklos Thanatz). Pynchon also employs quite a few evocative words, some of which are probably made up (I especially liked dracunculiasis, glyptic, tulipomania, noctiluca, proscenium, travalency, necropolism, sodomistical, and lycanthropophobia). The mystic in me also liked all of the references to the Tarot, Jewish mysticism, and the Hermetic Qabalah. And even though I'm not crazy about long books I liked the density and impenetrability of this one, the sense that one was literally immersing oneself into a labyrinth of words, and it got to the point where it even began to invade my dreams. Upon completing it, I initially felt a bit confused and dislocated, because I had spent so long prowling the book's WW II territory that it had almost become a sort of alternate reality for me. Granted, the book has some flaws: portions of it kind of meander, it's hard to care all that much about the characters in question, the constant "songs" can get irritating, and I detected a slight homophobic subtext (a constant comparison of homosexuality to Nazism, or anti-life/death in general) that kind of lessened my enjoyment of it a tad. But when all is said and done I'd probably rank it in my top 50 novels, and in terms of experimental/postmodern/post WW II literature it's certainly required reading. And once you finish it, you become part of that elite club that can brag, "I read Gravity's Rainbow," which makes it worth the effort. A difficult book, but in the end a rewarding one. I'm glad I was finally able to read it all the way through.

Self-Portrait

2011-02-17T18:41:00.000-08:00

RIP Kenneth Grant

2011-02-01T13:58:00.000-08:00

http://www.starfirepublishing.co.uk/main_frames_page.htm

(1923-2011)

"In the Aeon of Horus, physical life is recognized as a sacrament. Death is the disintegration of the gross body, but there is no interruption in the continuity of consciousness that once bound the bodily particles together. Death is the liberating kiss; the dissolution and release of the inmost particle of dust which is Hadit, eternally radiating energy at the heart of Nu: 'Feast! rejoice! there is no dread hereafter. There is the dissolution, and eternal ecstasy in the kisses of Nu.'"

"Death is to be understood as the invisible arc of a curve that disappears beneath the horizon of limited consciousness to reemerge, like the Sun, with its essential identity unimpaired."

-quotations from Kenneth Grant's The Magical Revival.

Mini-book review: Zachary German's "Eat When You Feel Sad"

2011-01-23T12:12:00.000-08:00

Zachary German's Eat When You Feel Sad is a slim novel (127 pages) that was published in late 2009 by ultra-trendy Melville House Publishing. Although he isn't referenced by name in the book, the shadow of Bret Easton Ellis looms large over Eat When You Feel Sad. In fact, the book really reminded me a lot of Ellis' debut novel, Less Than Zero, which was published in 1985. Less Than Zero was, at the time, referred to as "Catcher in the Rye for the MTV generation." I guess you could call Eat When You Feel Sad a Less Than Zero for the Twitter generation. Like Zero the book has no plot (or even chapters) and is instead a selection of very brief scenes from the life of Robert, a young vegetarian hipster who (I presume) lives in New York City. And while the book is written in the third person as opposed to Zero's first person, it still resembles Zero's clipped and minimalist style (here's a few sentences from a typical paragraph: "Robert is in his parents' house. He is in the kitchen. He looks at the microwave. The microwave is illuminated. There is a veggy burger patty in the microwave. Robert looks at a plate. There is a bun on the plate. He opens the refrigerator. Robert picks up the ketchup. He looks at a bag of lettuce. He picks up the bag of lettuce. Robert closes the refrigerator"). It almost reads less like a novel and more like a collection of Facebook status updates: indeed, there's a scene where Robert posts a status update on Facebook. Like Zero, the book features a large cast of characters who appear briefly and vanish just as quickly, and these characters are somehow even less fleshed out than the ammoral and hedonistic stick figures who populated Less Than Zero.

There's not a whole lot I have to say about this book because there isn't much in the way of content: just a long parade of scenes featuring Robert watching The Office, checking email on his laptop computer, masturbating to pornography, reading Joy Williams books, playing video games, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon beer with his aimless friends, shopping at American Apparel, eating at Chinese restaurants, making playlists on his iTunes, feeding his cat, riding his bike, and listening to music (like Ellis, German namechecks a lot of bands, at least close to 100, mainly indie rock bands like Death Cab For Cutie, Xiu Xiu and Broken Social Scene but also lots of hip-hop musicians like Ol' Dirty Bastard, Jay-Z and Lil' Wayne). Although there are a few scenes where Robert seems to realize the emptiness of his aimless life, for the most part it's hard to work up a great deal of sympathy (or even interest) in him or his circle of friends. I like reading these very short and minimalist modern novels because they don't take a whole lot of time to get through (and one doesn't need to exert all that much brain power in the process). But this book lacks the power of a Less Than Zero, a book where, beneath its shallow surface of passionless sex, pop culture references and 80's music, real horror lurked: serial killers and snuff films and anorexia and drug abuse and abortions and prostitution and child rape (whereas in Eat When You Feel Sad, there's practically no darkness at all, other than characters getting drunk, throwing up, and witnessing a minor car accident). German also seems to be trying to channel Dennis Cooper (whose name crops up twice in the book), but Cooper's characters possess real emotional depth, whereas those in Eat When You Feel Sad are pretty much just names on a page. Like a lot of younger writers, German strikes me as being too obsessed with style and not enough with content. This isn't to say I didn't enjoy this novel: I suppose it could function as a snapshot of today's youth, though I've never met anyone possessing the self-conscious vacuity displayed by the characters in this book. I just wish that German had something more profound to say about his generation.

Mini-book review: Lonely Christopher's "The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse"

2011-01-20T20:07:00.000-08:00

In 2003, the novelist Dennis Cooper launched his Little House on the Bowery series in connection with Akashic Books. Releasing around two books a year, this line of fiction books focuses mainly on younger North American writers who, according to an introduction for the series written by Dennis himself, "believe that fiction can be as entertaining, challenging, revelatory, and, in a word, important as any other medium. I hope Little House on the Bowery will be a reliable source for readers who want literature to be an adventure on the levels of content and style. I also want it to be an oasis for people who have come to see contemporary literature as a spotty, conservative medium." Over the years Little House on the Bowery has released a number of innovative and captivating books, including 2007's short fiction anthology Userlands (confession: a story of mine appeared in this book so naturally I'm biased) and, more recently, Mark Gluth's sublime novella The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis. Early this year they released their two newest titles, a reissue of Matthew Stokoe's cult transgressive novel Cows and Lonely Christopher's The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, a collection of nine short stories that I have just recently completed reading and will now briefly review.

This is certainly a most curious collection, and I'm having trouble classifying it. Many of the stories (which end on ambigious notes) feature characters with unusual names, such as Dumb, Vowel Shift, Burning Church, Normal Chapter, and Timmy Victim. And the writing style is very unusual. For example, the first story, "That Which," is narrated by a boy who suffered from a debilitating head injury and is thus written in a very disjointed manner. Equally bizarre is the subject matter: the fourth story, "Milk" (which is also the shortest story in the collection at a mere 4 pages) revolves around the murder of a horse in a kitchen. The better stories, in my opinion, are the longer ones that focus more on characterization, such as "Burning Church," (which deals with a week in the life of a school teacher named Burning Church), and "Game Belly," an atmospheric piece which takes place in an empty city late at night and which revolves around a number of vacuous characters going about their nocturnal activity (though I wonder what exactly a "game belly" is). By far the best story is "Nobody Understands Thorny When," which at 34 pages is the longest story of the book. It's about the relationship between an odd boy (named Thorny When) and his kidnapper (Normal Chapter), and their most strange love affair, and how Thorny's life changes when he's "saved" from his captor after four years.

Not all of the stories worked for me though. I had no idea what "The Pokemon Movie" was supposed to be about (perhaps because I'm not all that familiar with the Pokemon phenomenon in general), though if I had to hazard a guess I'd say it's about the loss of childhood innocence. And the last story, "White Dog," which is about a seven foot tall lesbian who wanders in a dream-like daze through a supermarket, goes on for way too long, with many tedious and rambling paragraphs (the narrator spends 4 pages debating whether to buy mascara or not).

For the most part, however, I found the stories to be well-written, entertaining and humorous. I can only wonder what Christopher's influences are... some of the stories have a sort of David Lynch vibe ("Burning Church" even features a hallway light that flickers constantly). He certainly has an impressive vocabulary: some words that really stood out were "videlicet," "pulchritude," and "contrastively." One thing is certain: it will be interesting to see in what direction he takes his fiction next.

Finally, like many of the other books released by Little House on the Bowery, this one also features a typically awesome cover by Joel Westendorf.

Mini-book review: Robert Aickman's "Cold Hand in Mine"

2011-01-14T09:35:00.000-08:00

As both a student and a writer of short fiction that could be classified as "supernatural," "horror," or just plain "weird," I'm constantly seeking out short story collections that fit the above terminology, if only to further refine my own craft. Hence my recent exploration of the work of Robert Aickman (1914-1982), an English conservationist and a writer of fiction (and mostly supernatural fiction at that). He wrote around 50 or so such stories, which were collected in around eight volumes over a period from 1951 to 1985 (many of these volumes are now out of print and very expensive). I first heard of Aickman through the music of Current 93: one of my favorite songs performed by that group, entitled "Niemandswasser," is named after an Aickman story of the same title. Cold Hand in Mine was originally published in England in 1975, but the American version (which I own) was put out by Scribner in 1977, with a dust jacket illustrated by one of my favorite artists, Edward Gorey. This collection of "strange" stories, Aickman's fifth, was, I believe, the first of his books to be published in the United States. It consists of eight short stories, four of which are over 30 pages long: "The Swords," "The Real Road to the Church," "Niemandswasser," "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal," "The Hospice," "The Same Dog," "Meeting Mr Millar," and "The Clock Watcher."

The collection opens with the following quote from Sacheverell Sitwell: "In the end it is the mystery that lasts and not the explanation." This is actually a perfect quote to use as it really does seem to sum up Aickman's stories, at least in this collection. Many of the stories here end in an open-ended or inconclusive manner. It's actually one of the things I find frustrating about Aickman. His (somewhat lenghty) stories have so much build-up and atmosphere, yet so often at the conclusion they just seem to fizzle out or go nowhere exciting. When Aickman is good, he's very good, but when he's not good, he just comes off as somewhat bland. There's a fine line between subtly and just plain perplexing, and Aickman walks it constantly. Some of the stories in this collection I would highly recommend (such as "Niemandswasser," "The Hospice," and "The Clock Watcher") but some of them, such as "Meeting Mr Millar" (the longest story in the collection at 36 pages) are just dull and go nowhere. I can't say that Aickman has the most exciting writing style in the world: while I enjoy the very controlled, elegant and somewhat cold manner of his style, at the same time I would often find myself hoping for a bit of chaos to seep in. For stories that were (I presume) written in the 1960's and 70's, these seem very old-fashioned, like products of the 19th century, what with their lack of profanity and sex that's only hinted at, for the most part (the writer who Aickman reminds me the most of is M.R. James, which might be a lazy generalization). His vocabulary isn't the most thrilling either, though he does drop a few words I don't often encounter in fiction, such as "ichthyologists" and "consecrationary." And there are some good quotes: "We control nothing of importance that happens to us" and "What other thought mattered than that nothing mattered?" or "As we acquire weight in the world, we lose it within ourselves" and (my favorite) "Everything to do with time is hideous." In the end, I think one of my biggest problems with Aickman (as skilled a writer as he is) is that his supernatural tales lack the grand unifying philosophies that make reading H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti (what with their deep-seated cosmic pessimism) such a thrilling intellectual experience.

Mini-book review: Johnny Weir's "Welcome to my World"

2011-01-12T09:00:00.001-08:00

Perhaps the biggest shocker of Johnny Weir's new autobiography Welcome to my World (Gallery Books, 2011) isn't Weir's now public confirmation of his homosexuality (which as even he notes doesn't even really need to be mentioned, it's so obvious) but the fact that probably 95% of the book is actually devoted to the topic of figure skating as opposed to, say, fashion or hanging out with celebrities. Although it opens up on a slightly cringe-inducing note, with a prologue full of ass-kissing and celebrity name-dropping that reads like something from a Bret Easton Ellis novel (the scene where he fawns over Sarah Jessica Parker is a bit much), Weir flashes back to his childhood and takes us on a tour of his life, from his early ambition to be a horse rider to his initial forays into the world of ice skating to his sexual awakening (he didn't lose his virginity until he was 20), to the struggles he's had to endure from skating judges who thought his style was too feminine, to his two appearances at the Olympics (the book ends after his performance at the 2010 Winter Olympics, which was when I myself noticed Weir for the first time, and became more interested in figure skating in general). Welcome to my World reveals Weir as a complex, contradictory and multi-faceted individual (he acknowledges that his wild and crazy public life is kind of at odds with his more quiet and shy private life) with interesting and articulate thoughts on topics such as homosexuality. One thing stands out clear: Weir takes figure skating very seriously (he also loves Russia, a country that seems to appreciate his skating style much more than his native America). The book was also fairly humorous (though it didn't have me laughing out loud like Kathy Griffin's autobiography from 2009, Official Book Club Selection), and gives the reader a good introduction into the back scene world of competitive figure skating. I also found it kind of charming how he thanked Lady Gaga (among other divas) in the acknowledgments at the end. The book made me want to go onto Youtube immediately after I finished it and check out some of Weir's past performances.

More details on "The Marble Index"

2011-01-08T10:56:00.000-08:00

From the back cover description:

"James Champagne returns to the exotic and decadent world of Trinity in The Marble Index, the long-awaited sequel to the story he began in Illuminated Shadows. In this volume, rebel girl Karen Blaise and her best friend Poison Flower (the beautiful leader of the Pagans) set out in search of a legendary book known as the Marble Index, in the hope that it will tell them where to find the Griffin, a mythological beast that is the only being on the planet who can restore Karen's atrophied magical powers. Meanwhile the Shadows, an anarchistic terrorist secret society, begin a recruitment drive led by their leader, the charismatic woman known as Jerina Markay. Jerina and her friends will travel all around Trinity, from the depths of the Dwarf Kingdom to the heights of the Karnark Imperium, in the quest to gain new allies in their battle against the oppressive Kingdom. And in the steampunk metropolis of Zone, glam assassin Sypha Nadon plans to break out of jail to clear his name of a crime he didn't commit, and uncover the secrets of the mysterious Dr. Oment, the mastermind behind all of Trinity's recent woes. These various storylines eventually intertwine and build up to a shattering, apocalyptic conclusion, in which nothing will ever be the same again. All of this sets the stage for what will no doubt be a pulse-pounding final volume."

Main cast:

Adam Lambert: Sypha Nadon
Kristen Stewart: Karen Blaise
Melanie Laurent: Jerina Markay
Katy Perry: Poison Flower
Christina Hendricks: Marilyn Curtis
Stephen Rea: Cole Galdur
Christoph Waltz: Dr. Oment Nerrod
Ian McKellen: Arthur Trevador
Christian Bale: Steve Hunter
Jeff Bridges: Bemos Sherwin
Owen Wilson: Peter Miller
Michael Clarke Duncan: Kain Setter
Rosario Dawson: Pamelon Giry
Cillian Murphy: Egon Jordan
Rowan Atkinson: Catno Catoni (voice)
????: Sophia Thaig

Secondary cast:

Lady Gaga: Isabelle DeVando
John Turturro: Victor DaScar
John O'Hurley: Duane DaTes
Grant Morrison: Oswald Wirth
Ted Levine: Donald Dubwa
????: Eom Fairhaven
Blixa Bargeld: The Crimson King
Siouxsie Sioux: The Oracle
Brendan Gleeson: Dr. Vastarien
????: King Virago
Reginald VelJohnson: Harv Durrell
Rupert Boneham: King Ian Isrengard
Willem Dafoe: Skenlark (voice)
Stephen Russell: Syd Muller
????: Oscar Twist
Brent Corrigan: Paul
Sean Bean: Jarvis Sena
David Tibet: The Griffin (voice)

soundtrack:

Nico: Nibelungen (opening credits)
Nine Inch Nails: Happiness in Slavery
The Beatles: Nowhere Man
Nine Inch Nails: Ringfinger
Nico: Frozen Warnings
Switchblade Symphony: Doll House
Nine Inch Nails: Into the Void
Kate Bush: Wow
The Beatles: Come Together
My Chemical Romance: Planetary (Go!)
Pink Floyd: Us and Them
Nine Inch Nails: We're in This Together
Ke$ha: Cannibal
Siouxsie & the Banshees: Hybrid
No Doubt: Home Now
Genesis: The Last Domino
Lady Gaga: Teeth
Marilyn Manson: The Reflecting God
Nine Inch Nails: Ripe (With Decay) (end credits 1)
Coil: The First Five Minutes After Death (end credits 2)

Table of contents:

1. Marilyn Visits the Bonehoard
2. Karen and Ivy
3. A Conference of Shadows
4. Sypha in the Underworld
5. St. Bloch's Keys All Bloody
6. Ringfinger
7. The Hole in THings
8. Isrengard Redux
9. A Bond of Blood
10. Breakout at Blusterford Prison
11. En Route
12. Back From the Dead
13. Frozen Warnings
14. Conspiracy Theory
15. Amongst the Dwarves
16. Dr. Vastarien's Mannikin Masquerade
17. Dark Revelations
18. Into the Void
19. Wow
20. Strangers in the Night
21. Come Together
22. Us and Them
23. Kitty Empire
24. Hybrid
25. The Last Supper
26. Cross-Check
27. The Triumph of Death

influences:

Nico's The Marble Index album
The Thief computer game series
Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels
Grant Morrison's Batman and Robin comic book
Bioware's Dragon Age: Origins computer game
The music of Nine Inch Nails, Switchblade Symphony, and Pink Floyd
Nine Inch Nails music videos
the short horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti
Edward Gorey's art
China Mieville's novel Perdido Street Station
the films of Jan Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay

The Marble Index is complete

2011-01-02T12:00:00.000-08:00

Sometime in October of 2000 I finished writing a book called Illuminated Shadows, which was the first book of what was intended to be a six book fantasy series. I started work on a second book shortly afterwards, but ended up quitting it at around 15 pages. In the year 2005, I started from scratch again, with the intention of calling it The Marble Index and making it the central volume of a trilogy (as opposed to six books). From January of 2005 to late April of 2009 I wrote around 84 pages before quitting again.

On August 4th of 2010 I once again began work on The Marble Index, again starting from scratch. I highly doubted I'd finish this attempt either. But I guess that the third time's the charm, because this afternoon, at 12:41 pm on January 2nd, 2011, I wrote out the final page. The book ended up being 278 pages total, bringing the two books to slightly under the 600 page mark. This is the first book I've written out entirely by hand since Illuminated Shadows a decade ago. All in all, it took around 88 days of actual writing (as I barely wrote anything at all in September and the first half of January).

Even though I wrote this book mainly for my own personal satisfaction, to prove that I could still write out a whole book by hand if I wanted to, and have no intention of ever trying to get it published, it's still an accomplishment, in my eyes, to complete a book I thought would never exist anywhere but inside my own head.

I guess this means I'll be completing The Age of Nothing (the third and final book of the trilogy) in 2021!

2010 Reading List Finale

2010-12-31T09:09:00.000-08:00

2010 Reading List Total:

1. "The Devil: Perceptions of Evil From Antiquity to Primitive Christianity" (Jeffrey Burton Russell) 1/1/10
2. "V." (Thomas Pynchon) 1/11/10
3. "Naked Lunch: The 50th Anniversary Edition" (William S. Burroughs) 1/16/10 *
4. "Hollywood Babylon" (Kenneth Anger) 1/19/10
5. "T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism" (Hakim Bey) 1/29/10
6. "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (Lewis Carroll/Camille Rose Garcia) 2/1/10 *
7. "Impossible Princess" (Kevin Killian) 2/7/10
8. "Satan and the Early Christian Tradition" (Jeffrey Burton Russell) 2/19/10
9. "Child of God" (Cormac McCarthy) 2/23/10
10. "The Origin of Satan" (Elaine Pagels) 2/27/10
11. "The History of Hell" (Alice K. Turner) 3/2/10
12. "Blood Meridian: or the Evening Redness of the West" (Cormac McCarthy) 3/13/10
13. "Good Girls Don't" (J.M. Cosentino) 3/14/10
14. "Tongues Tied to Anchors" (Laurence Wilhelm Lillvik) 3/20/10
15. "No Country for Old Men" (Cormac McCarthy) 3/22/10
16. "The Road" (Cormac McCarthy) 3/26/10
17. "Grimoire" (James Champagne) 3/30/10 *
18. "Despair" (Vladimir Nabokov) 4/7/10
19. "Invitation to a Beheading" (Vladimir Nabokov) 4/13/10
20. "Port of Saints" (William S. Burroughs) 4/18/10
21. "Maldoror" (Comte de Lautreamont) 4/23/10 *
22. "Turmoil in the Toybox" (Phil Phillips) 4/25/10
23. "Mere Christianity" (C.S. Lewis) 4/29/10
24. "The New Testament" (various) 5/2/10
25. "The Abolition of Man" (C.S. Lewis) 5/3/10
26. "The Great Divorce" (C.S. Lewis) 5/9/10
27. "A Grief Observed" (C.S. Lewis) 5/10/10
28. "Lolita" (Vladimir Nabokov) 5/15/10
29. "The Screwtape Letters"/"Screwtape Proposes a Toast" (C.S. Lewis) 5/15/10
30. "Wittgenstein's Nephew" (Thomas Bernhard) 5/19/10
31. "Pnin" (Vladimir Nabokov) 5/20/10
32. "Death Sentence" (Maurice Blanchot) 5/22/10
33. "Less Than Zero" (Bret Easton Ellis) 5/26/10 *
34. "American Psycho" (Bret Easton Ellis) 6/3/10 *
35. "Psycho" (Robert Bloch) 6/4/10
36. "Moonchild" (Aleister Crowley) 6/12/10 *
37. "The Book of the Law" (Aleister Crowley) 6/13/10 *
38. "Imperial Bedrooms" (Bret Easton Ellis) 6/17/10
39. "Coma" (Pierre Guyotat) 6/22/10
40. "Pale Fire" (Vladimir Nabokov) 6/30/10
41. "The Conspiracy Against the Human Race" (Thomas Ligotti) 7/11/10
42. "Smothered in Hugs" (Dennis Cooper) 7/12/10
43. "Tao Te Ching" (Lao Tzu) 7/14/10
44. "Necronomicon" (Simon) 7/19/10 *
45. "The Naked Civil Servant" (Quentin Crisp) 7/20/10
46. "The Hellbound Heart" (Clive Barker) 7/24/10
47. "Books of Blood Volume I" (Clive Barker) 8/3/10
48. "Closer" (Dennis Cooper) 8/8/10 *
49. "Kwaidan: Japanese Ghost Stories" (Lafcadio Hearn) 8/8/10
50. "Bruges-la-Morte" (Georges Rodenbach) 8/10/10
51. "Frisk" (Dennis Cooper) 8/11/10 *
52. "Try" (Dennis Cooper) 8/15/10 *
53. "Guide" (Dennis Cooper) 8/19/10 *
54. "Period" (Dennis Cooper) 8/21/10 *
55. "Scorch Atlas" (Blake Butler) 8/22/10
56. "Crash" (J.G. Ballard) 8/29/10
57. "The Curse of the Blue Figurine" (John Bellairs) 9/7/10 *
58. "Brother Curwen, Brother Crowley: a Correspondence" (Aleister Crowley/David Curwen) 9/8/10
59. "American Campgrounds" (Philip Best/Peter Sotos) 9/9/10
60. "The Cathedral" (J.K. Huysmans) 9/25/10
61. "The Malady of Death" (Marguerite Duras) 9/25/10
62. "Recollections of the Golden Triangle" (Alain Robbe-Grillet) 9/25/10
63. "Imperial Bedrooms" (Bret Easton Ellis) 9/28/10 *
64. "At the Feet of the Guru" (Kenneth Grant) 10/2/10 *
65. "Hidden Lore" (Kenneth & Steffi Grant) 10/3/10
66. "Songs of a Dead Dreamer" (THomas Ligotti) 10/5/10 *
67. "Obsessions" (Joseph Mills) 10/9/10 *
68. "Soluble Fish" (Andre Breton) 10/11/10
69. "The Upanishads" (translator: Eknath Easwaran) 10/12/10
70. "First Steps 2 Forever: My Story" (Justin Bieber) 10/15/10
71. "The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi" (Ramana Maharshi) 10/17/10
72. "Uncle Silas" (J.S. Le Fanu) 10/21/10
73. "Siddhartha" (Herman Hesse) 10/27/10
74. "Frankenstein" (Mary Shelley) 10/28/1
75. "ACT" (N.J. Rhoades) 11/7/10
76. "The Collector" (John Fowles) 11/8/10
77. "Dark Awakenings" (Matt Cardin) 11/19/10
78. "Communion" (Whitley Strieber) 11/20/10
79. "Close Range: Wyoming Stories" (Annie Proulx) 11/27/10
80. "The Problem of Pain" (C.S. Lewis) 11/28/10
81. "The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman" (Angela Carter) 12/8/10
82. "The Man Who Was Thursday" (G.K. Chesterton) 12/10/10
83. "Dark Entries" (Robert Aickman) 12/30/10

*= something I've read at least once in the past.

Not included in this list are all the individual short stories I've read this year (essentially, 15 of Poe's, 5 of Kafka's, 13 of Flannery O'Connor's, 6 of Nabokov's, 1 of Algernon Blackwood's and Guy De Maupassant's, 5 of Borges', 3 of J.G. Ballard's, and a few Lovecraft's). I also read the first two volumes of Alan Moore's "Swamp Thing" and re-read the first two volumes of Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" graphic novel (and also re-read Grant Morrison's "Doom Patrol" series). Also read some of Enid Blyton's Noddy books.

2008 reading list:

1. "The City and the Pillar" (Gore Vidal) (Jan. 3) 1948
2. "Sway" (Zachary Lazar) (Jan. 9) 2008
3. "Paradoxia" (Lydia Lunch) (Jan. 12) 1997
4. "Eden Eden Eden" (Pierre Guyotat) (Jan. 23) 1970
5. "The Maimed" (Hermann Ungar) (Jan. 25) 1923
6. "Jack the Modernist" (Robert Gluck) (Jan. 25) 1985
7. "The Stranger" (Albert Camus) (Jan. 26) 1946
8. "Less Than Zero" (Bret Easton Ellis) (Jan. 30) 1985 *
9. "The Torture Garden" (Octave Mirbeau) (Jan. 31) 1899
10. "Zombie" (Joyce Carol Oates) (Jan. 31) 1995
11. "The Atrocity Exhibition" (J.G. Ballard) (Feb. 7) 1970
12. "Play it as it Lays" (Joan Didion) (Feb. 10) 1970
13. "The Blind Owl" (Sadegh Hedayat) (Feb. 10) 1937
14. "La-Bas" (J.K. Huysmans) (Feb. 15) 1891 *
15. "Against Nature" (J.K. Huysmans) (Feb. 22) 1884
16. "Moravagine" (Blaise Cendrars) (Feb. 29) 1926
17. "Briefing for a Descent Into Hell" (Doris Lessing)(March 14)1971
18. "In a Glass Darkly" (Sheridan Le Fanu) (March 18) 1872
19. "The Weaklings" (Dennis Cooper) (March 22) 2008
20. "The Mage's Holiday" (Tom Champagne) (April) 2003
21. "Invisible Cities" (Italo Calvino) (April 9) 1972
22. "Exercises in Style" (Raymond Queneau) (April 17) 1947
23. "The Wild Boys" (William S. Burroughs) (April 21) 1969 *
24. "Downstream" (J.K. Huysmans) (April 21) 1882
25. "The Crying of Lot 49" (Thomas Pynchon) (April 27) 1965
26. "The End of the World Book" (Alistar McCartney) (May 1) 2008
27. "Foucault's Pendulum" (Umberto Eco) (May 8) 1988
28. "Us Ones in Between" (Blair Mastbaum) (May 10) 2008
29. "The Man Who Fought Alone" (Stephen R. Donaldson)(May 23) 2001 *
30. "Valis" (Philip K. Dick) (May 26) 1981 *
31. "Angels of Perversity" (Remy de Gourmont) (June 30) late 1890's
32. "Monsieur de Phocas" (Jean Lorrain) (July 6) 1901
33. "Inferno" (August Strindberg) (July 10) 1897
34. "Soul Kitchen" (Poppy Z. Brite) (July 19) 2006
35. "Monsieur Venus" (Rachilde) (July 20) 1884
36. "A Haven" (J.K. Huysmans) (July 26) 1886
37. "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (Truman Capote) (July 30)
38. "Surfaces" (Thomas Moore) (Aug. 7) 2008
39. "Bat-Wing" (Sax Rohmer) (Aug. 13) 1921
40. "Convolvulus & Other Poems" (Kenneth Grant) (Aug. 14) 2005
41. "Recollections of the Golden Triangle" (Alain Robbe-Grillet) (Aug. 18) 1978
42. "Gamaliel/Dance, Doll, Dance!" (Kenneth Grant) (Aug. 23) 2003
43. "The Other Child & Other Tales" (Kenneth Grant) (Aug. 27) 2003
44. "Our Lady of the Flowers" (Jean Genet) (Sept. 3) 1943
45. "The Street of Crocodiles" (Bruno Schulz) (Sept. 7) 1934
46. "The Hearing Trumpet" (Leonora Carrington) (Sept. 10) 1976
47. "En Route" (J.K. Huysmans) (Sept. 10) 1895
48. "Some Kind of Love" (Jack Dickson) (Sept. 14) 2002
49. "God Jr." (Dennis Cooper) (Sept. 21) 2005 *
50. "The Beetle" (Richard Marsh) (Sept. 22) 1897
51. "Action Kylie" (Kevin Killian) (Oct. 20) 2008
52. "Against the Light" (Kenneth Grant) (Nov. 5) 1997 *
53. "The Elementary Particles" (Michel Houellebecq) (Nov. 15) 2001
54. "The Miracle of the Rose" (Jean Genet) (Nov. 22) 1946
55. "Teatro Grottesco" (Thomas Ligotti) (Dec. 17) 2008
56. "Grimscribe" (Thomas Ligotti) (Dec. 23) 1994

2009 reading list:

1. "Songs of a Dead Dreamer" Thomas Ligotti (1/6/09) short story collection
2. "Gnosticism" Stephen Hoeller (1/9/09) religion
3. "Voudon Gnosis" David Beth (1/10/09) occult
4. "My Work is Not Yet Done" Thomas Ligotti (1/12/09) short story collection
5. "Hospital" Thomas Moore (1/23/09) poetry
6. "Nausea" Jean-Paul Sarte (2/18/09) novel
7. "Kierkegaard for Beginners" Donald D. Palmer (2/20/09) non-fiction
8. "Ariel: Restored Edition" Sylvia Plath (2/21/09) poetry
9. "The Bell Jar" Sylvia Plath (2/23/09) novel
10. "Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos" Various (3/12/09) short story collection
11. "The Mind Parasites" Colin Wilson (3/23/09) novel
12. "The Philosopher's Stone" Colin Wilson (4/2/09) novel
13. "The Magus" John Fowles (4/27/09) novel
14. "Snakewand/The Darker Stain" Kenneth Grant (5/2/09) novella collection
15. "Noctuary" Thomas Ligotti (5/8/09) short story collection
16. "Lovely Biscuits" Grant Morrison (5/21/09) short story collection
17. "Ugly Man" Dennis Cooper (5/23/09) short story collection
18. "The Space Vampires" Colin Wilson (5/30/09) novel
19. "Cities of the Red Night" William S. Burroughs (6/29/09) novel *
20. "Safe" Dennis Cooper (7/7/09) novel
21. "The Show That Smells" Derek McCormack (7/8/09) novel
22. "Count Magnus & Other Ghost Stories" M.R. James (7/11/09) short story collection
23. "The Burning Bombing of America" Kathy Acker (7/11/09) novella
24. "Great Expectations" Kathy Acker (7/18/09) novel
25. "Empire of the Senseless" Kathy Acker (7/19/09) novel
26. "Florida" Kathy Acker (7/22/09) novella?
27. "The Place of Dead Roads" William S. Burroughs (7/27/09) novel *
28. "Blood and Guts in High School" Kathy Acker (8/1/09) novel
29. "Perdido Street Station" China Mieville (8/4/09) novel
30. "A Season in Hell/Illuminations" Arthur Rimbaud (8/5/09) poetry
31. "The Shit of God" Diamanda Galas (8/6/09) poetry
32. "Ficciones" Jorge Lois Borges (8/9/09) short stories
33. "The Consumer" Michael Gira (8/17/09) short stories
34. "Funeral Rites" Jean Genet (8/26/09) novel
35. "Inherent Vice" Thomas Pynchon (8/28/09) novel
36. "The Thief's Journal" Jean Genet (9/10/09) novel
37. "The Western Lands" William S. Burroughs (9/16/09) novel
38. "Magic & Mystery in Tibet" Alexandra David-Neel (9/18/09) Hindu/Buddhist
39. "The Gita: a New Translation of Sacred Hindu Scripture" Irina N. Gajjar (9/19/09) Hindu
40. "Official Book Club Selection" Kathy Griffin (9/23/09) biography
41. "Shy" Kevin Killian (9/30/09) novel
42. "Ether, God & Devil/Cosmic Superimposition" Wilhelm Reich (10/3/09) philosophy?
43. "The Letters of Mina Harker" Dodie Bellamy (10/10/09) novel
44. "The Interior Castle" St. Teresa of Avila (10/20/09) mysticism
45. "Lost Souls" Poppy Z. Brite (10/29/09) * novel
46. "Marthe: The Story of a Whore" J.K. Huysmans (10/29/09) novel
47. "The Dhammapada" Buddha (10/29/09) * Buddhist
48. "Downstream" J.K. Huysmans (10/31/09) * novella
49. "The Wall" Jean-Paul Sartre (11/2/09) short stories
50. "The Plague" Albert Camus (11/6/09) novel
51. "The Flowers of Evil" Charles Baudelaire (11/10/09) poetry
52. "The Informers" Bret Easton Ellis (11/14/09) * novel
53. "Cold Print" Ramsey Campbell (11/25/09) short stories
54. "Against Nature" J.K. Huysmans (11/29/09) * novel
55. "The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis" Mark Gluth (12/4/09) novella
56. "In November We'll Burn" Andrew Champagne (12/10/09) novel
57. "The Picture of Dorian Gray" Oscar Wilde (12/16/09) novel
58. "No Exit" Jean-Paul Sartre (12/25/09) play

2010 in retrospect

2010-12-27T11:25:00.000-08:00

By all accounts, 2010 was something of a difficult year for me, one that had more downs than ups. It started off badly in January, when I had to undergo an endoscopy to see if there was anything wrong with my stomach and esophagus (other than slight inflammation, however, the biopsy revealed nothing wrong). Then the following month I suffered through some kind of stomach virus that had me vomiting violently, and even though it passed quickly, a few days after the fact I developed a hysterical/anxiety-related condition in which it felt as if I couldn't swallow food. Thanks to the virus my weight plummeted down to 119 pounds at one point and, not to sound like a drama queen or anything, I really did feel like I was on the verge of death. So, the year started off with me hitting rock bottom and ever since then it's felt like I've been trying to pull myself out of Hell (though I did manage to get my weight back into the 130's range). A series of bad sinus infections and a bout of conjunctivitis over the summer did little to help my already sour mood. Then in the Fall I found myself in a very stressful situation at work that forced me to choose to work part-time, because the alternative I just couldn't deal with. More recently I've been dealing with the usual Irritable Bowel Syndrome and colitis issues, along with a nagging case of heartburn that's driving me crazy, even though the medication I'm on is supposed to get rid of that kind of problem. In short, my health has been lousy, even more so than usual.

There have been personal problems as well. Over the summer I made friends on Facebook with a Korean woman, who is around my age, and who is a college student at a university in Buffalo, NY. We hit it off quite well (as we had much in common in terms of literary tastes) and I spent many long hours talking with her on Facebook chat, where she was quite flirty. I found some of these conversations exhausting, though, as this person was prone to suicidal depression and her requests for me to cheer her up were emotionally draining (and I'm not exactly a barrel of monkeys myself). Some of my friends warned me to avoid her, saying that she liked playing mind games and that she dropped people as friends on Facebook on the merest whims, but I always defended her. Then one night in early September or so she just dropped me as a friend with no warning, and when I asked her why her response basically was "for no reason." That really hurt me and I felt like a fool for wasting so much time trying to help her with her problems (to say nothing of defending her reputation).

Not that it was all doom and gloom. I ended up finding a publisher for my short story collection, which was a huge boost to my self-esteem. I've read 80 or so books this year, a new record for me (I hope to post the full list on this blog very soon, probably on the final day of 2010), and I finally got around to exploring the works of Cormac McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, and C.S. Lewis. I read the entire New Testament for the first time, and next year I plan on reading the Bible in its entirety (I also read some Eastern religious texts I've been meaning to get to for awhile now, such as the Tao Te Ching and the Upanishads). I constructed two highly informative days for Dennis Cooper's blog, one revolving around the music of Current 93 and the other on the philosophical horror of Thomas Ligotti. I saw two live shows this year, Lady Gaga when she was in Boston in July and Adam Lambert in August when he was at Lupo's in Providence, and both of those shows were really great. I went to Philadelphia with my family for a few days in August and it was really cool and inspiring to see the Liberty Bell in person. I also got a lot of writing done in The Marble Index, a book I always thought would ever exist only in my head: now I'm just starting the final chapter, and even though I have no plans on publishing it it's nice to finally have it done, after all these years. I made some new friends, which is always a plus. And finally, I started up this blog, which seems to be going pretty well so far.

My plans for 2011 include the following: to get a few short stories published, to start work on a new "official" novel, to go back to college to study computers in the hopes of landing an office job involving data processing, to build my health back up, and to continue writing material for this blog.

Oh yeah, I decided to start watching some new TV shows also. This Fall I began with Glee and next year I hope to start watching Mad Men (because I kind of have the hots for Christina Hendricks).

Despite the fact I face much adversity in my life, mainly from an anxiety/depression disorder and my chronic stomach/intestinal/digestive problems, I don't plan to give up the fight just yet because I feel I still have more work to do on this planet. With that in mind, I'd like to end this blog entry off with my new favorite inspirational song, sung by another celebrity I have the hots for, Glee's Chris Colfer:

Merry Christmas!

2010-12-24T18:38:00.000-08:00

Thomas Ligotti Day

2010-12-24T09:30:00.000-08:00

An introduction I wrote to the philosophical horror fiction of Thomas Ligotti is now up on Dennis Cooper's blog. Those curious may check it out at the following link:

http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/2010/12/sypha-presents-autopsy-on-puppet.html

Family of Geniuses

2010-12-22T09:24:00.000-08:00

Whenever I'm pressed to name my all-time favorite film, my usual response is Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums. There are many reasons why I select this particular movie, too many to cite in this entry. But I will mention two things I really like about the film: firstly, I like how the three gifted Tenenbaum children (Chas, Margot and Richie) remind me of myself and my brothers, and secondly, I like the fact that most of the characters in the film are writers of some sort or another, many of whom have at least one book published to their credit.

In this blog so far I've mostly written about my own writing projects and looked back at many of my old books, but today I'd like to briefly focus my attention on the work of my younger brothers. I have three younger brothers: Tom, who was born in 1982 (and who was named after the Who's rock opera Tommy), then Bill (who I think was named after Prince William), who was born in 1984, and finally Andrew, who was born in 1986 (for those curious, I was named after James Taylor). Of the four of us, only Bill isn't a writer in the traditional sense, though being a gifted composer of music, you could call him a writer in that regard. But this entry deals with the novels written by Tom and Andrew.

Here's a picture of Tom, Andrew and I taken, I believe, by our mother outside our house in April or May of 2004. Later on that night our punk rock band, the Mute Ants, played a gig, a sort of "Battle of the Bands" at Woonsocket High School, which I graduated from all the way back in 1998 and Tom graduated from in 2000 (at the time this picture was taken, the only one of my brothers who was still a student there was Andrew). I'm the one in the Poison t-shirt, Tom is wearing the Transplants t-shirt and holding the blue bass guitar, and Andrew is clad in the Clash t-shirt and holding the red electric guitar. Despite the fact he's holding a guitar (which is his own), he actually played drums that night, while I "played" guitar and keyboards and Tom handled bass and vocal duties. And even though he's wearing sunglasses in the photos, I was the only one who actually wore shades when we performed. But I digress.

Since the year 2002, Andrew, the youngest of us, has written six books. Here they are:

In the year 2002 he wrote his first novel, All I do in Love, which was a little over 200 pages long, and dealt with a college rock band that ends in bloodshed and tragedy. That same year he started work on a fantasy trilogy, which he completed in 2005 or so. I forget the names of these books (as I never actually read them), but I think one of them was entitled The Imperfection of Creation. The three books as a whole were well over 1000 pages total. After that, Andrew began typing out books as opposed to writing them by hand. In 2008 he completed In November We'll Burn, a novel about a lobster-loving young woman (who resembles the singer/actress Mandy Moore) who gets involved with a group of anarchists, and the novelist who is in love with her. This book (which was inspired by Stephen King's novel Hearts in Atlantis and the music of Rilo Kiley) was over 500 pages long and written in a non-linear format, its chapters being structured after the 14 Stations of the Cross. I read it last year... it's pretty good. In 2010, Andrew typed out a second novel, Brigit, which I think is also over 500 pages. It's a post-apocalyptic novel with religious overtones inspired by, among other things, the film Cloverfield and the music of Paramore. I haven't read it yet but hope to in 2011... my dad is reading it right now and likes it so far.

At the moment, Andrew is working on a new novel that I think is to be around 700 or 800 pages long, and will be his homage to Stephen King's It (one of his all-time favorite novels). After that he wants to write a 1,000 page book about a woman who keeps being reincarnated, which will be his attempt to write "The Great American Novel." Perhaps needless to say, Andrew's favorite writers are Stephen King and J.K. Rowling, and because he likes their long books it inspires him to write his own long novels (he somewhat arrogantly dismisses 300 page novels as being "short novels"). Of the three of us, he focuses the most on story and plot.

Of course, when it comes to sheer prolific writing amongst us, it's impossible to surpass Tom, who from the year 1995 to around 2006-2007 wrote out, by hand, a staggering 23 novels. Here they all are, in all their glory (and I've read almost all of them):

Words cannot express the true strangeness of some of Tom's books. Because he's not exactly a big reader himself, his books thus bear little resemblance to any book that you would encounter in a bookstore. When I wrote the first book of my "Magic Fantasy" trilogy in 1995 (Janine and the Jedbeast), and our father liked it, Tom, jealous, decided to write his own fantasy trilogy, "The Magical Fantasy" trilogy. Later on, when I began writing basketball thrillers, Tom started doing the same. But eventually, around 1997 or so, he started branching off into new areas, such as his book Rachel, about a female convict on death row who gets a second chance at life when she agrees to take part in a bizarre quest to find organs for people who need organ replacements. Then there was The Rascal King, about a serial killer who was inspired by the career of Boston politician James Michael Curley and the music of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones.

By far Tom's most ambitious project is his Magical Fantasy series, which so far is up to 8 titles. The first three books of the trilogy (The Fight for the Jetbeast, The Search for the Jetbeast, and The World of the Jetbeast) were, like my first trilogy, heavily inspired by the Star Wars films and the Final Fantasy video game series (they were also, to some extent, rip-offs of my own trilogy, ironically enough). But whereas I stopped after three books, Tom kept going. He eventually did a fourth book, The Eternal War, which was completed in 1997, then a fifth book, Shadows of Time , which was finished the following year. After that he took a break from fantasy for awhile, to focus on his "Kremlin" books (see below) but around 2002 or 2003 he began a further addition to the series, a new trilogy: The Mages' Holiday, The Garden of Mercedes, and My Only One. This new trilogy was over 1,600 pages long (The Garden of Mercedes alone was over 700 pages).

Another of his more ambitious works is his "Kremlin" series. These books were set in Philadelphia and revolved around Tom's most well-known character, the real estate mogul Todd Kremlin, owner of Kremlin Industries. The first book in the series, Payday (1998) was essentially a crime novel inspired by the films of Quentin Tarantino, but as the series went along the Mafia plotline of the first book was slowly phased out and the books focused more on Kremlin's romantic feelings for Jill, his CEO (who was in her twenties in terms of age, while Kremlin was in his fifties). The books that followed included Money for Nothing in 1998, A Penny Earned in 1998, Cash in 1999, and Pocket Change in 1999 (that final one was the largest book in the series, being 616 pages in lenght). In the year 2000 Tom wrote a sixth book in the series, My Best Friend, which at 516 pages was also pretty long.

However, by far Tom's biggest achievement was his book Following an Angel, which he began in the year 2000 and completed (I believe) in the year 2002. This book, at 1,016 pages, is the longest book that any of us has ever written:

Following an Angel is set in a sort of alternate universe version of the Kremlin series. Again set in Philadelphia, it stars Tom Kremlin, the 27 year old CEO of Kremlin Industries. Tom falls in love with Jill, who is the CEO of a rival real estate company. Later on he falls in love with another woman, Heidi, a supermodel who collects basketball cards. Eventually Kremlin has to chose between the two women. That's basically all the book has in the way of a "plot." What's most notable about its size is how little actually happens in it. I'd like to write some more about this book one day because I really do think it almost borders on "outsider art" but for the moment, this is all I have to say about it: it truly is an epic, at least in terms of size.

Ever since finishing up the new trilogy for his fantasy series Tom hasn't done much writing. However, next year he plans on finally typing out a novel on his computer (he's never typed out a full-length novel on a computer before) and he plans to self-publish it in 2012, I believe. I don't know much of what it's about, but I do know that Todd Kremlin will be returning as a character.

So, amongst Tom, Andrew, and myself, from the year 1995 we've completed a total of 41 books. Of those 41 books, only one is actually set to be published. But I'm sure that both Tom and Andrew will be published one day. As it is, I find their unpublished work to be a thousand times more interesting and unique than most of the books being put out by mainstream publishers today.

Writing Update

2010-12-21T12:06:00.000-08:00

I'm finally almost done writing out the first draft of "The Yellow Notebook." Hopefully I'll finish that one this year. Then it's just a matter of typing it out, then submitting it to the usual genre magazines. One of my goals for 2011 is to try to write at least one short story a month, and to try to get some of those short stories published. As it is, I have plenty of ideas for stories at the moment, though some of those ideas consist mainly of titles that I think sound cool (such as "The Evil Animators").

On the novel writing front... when I initially found out that Grimoire was going to be published, I decided that I wouldn't start any other major projects until it was actually released, aside from working on the occasional short story. So it's my hope to start work on a new novel next year. In the meantime, to keep from getting rusty, I've been working on The Marble Index, which is book two of my Trinity fantasy trilogy. It's been nearly a decade since I finished book one, so I figured this one's time had come. I started work on it on August 4th of this year and now I'm nearly 240 pages into it, with only about 40 pages to go, so I hope to finish it in January. It's been hard work because I've been writing it all out by hand, in the fashion that I wrote all those old books back in high school and college (see my earlier Previous Works/Juvenilia entry). But it's satisfying to me to finally be finishing book two, and even though I have no intentions of publishing this one it's a nice way to remind myself that I can still write novels when I put my mind to it (ever since I finished Confusion in 2006 I've been kind of lax on the novel writing front, though I did have some failed attempts, such as a novel set at Warhol's Silver Factory during the 1960's, or a short novel about a retail worker employed at a bookstore job he hated). I'm just not sure what my next "official" novel is going to be about.

Some of my favorite music videos from 2010

2010-12-17T11:23:00.001-08:00

Lady Gaga: Telephone

Lady Gaga: Alejandro

Justin Bieber: Somebody To Love

Ke$ha: We R Who We R

Adam Lambert: Whataya Want From Me

Katy Perry: Firework

My Chemical Romance: Na Na Na

Greyson Chance: Waiting Outside The Lines

College Writings #1: "The Final Chapter"

2010-12-16T10:21:00.000-08:00

NOTE: This is the first in an ongoing series related to short stories I wrote during my college years.

While a student at Rhode Island College, I took a few creative writing courses, the first of which took place during the Fall of 2001. For that semester we had to write two long short stories and a number of short writing assignments. For my first long story I wrote something named "The Final Chapter" (though the original first draft title, inscrutably enough, was "Hippomoromenous"). This story was written in October of 2001 and I believe it was also workshopped that same month. I'd hardly call it great writing: the premise is very twee and kind of Neil Gaimanesque, the writing is overly melodramatic, and I could have done without the ham-fisted metafictional intermission, which I thought was clever at the time (when I was 21 years old) but now strikes me as pointless. On the other hand, I do find it somewhat amusing, and it does mark the first appearance of the character known as Mr. Feathers (who the class loved): he went on to appear in some of my later novels such as PunkModernist and Confusion. In any event, "The Final Chapter" was my first true attempt at writing a short story, and I present it here, warts and all.

"The Final Chapter"
(by James Champagne)

If life were a novel, then you'd be on your last chapter Edward Westerburg thought to himself bitterly as he stared out at the bright blue sea one fine morning.

Dear God, Edward, is that what your life has come to? Using bad analogies?

Edward shook his head in disgust and chucked a rock at the ocean. He watched it sink and vanish.

Edward Westerburg was 75 years old, a tall, well built man with a tight, muscular body. In the past his skin had once been a pale color, but after eight years of living on a tiny island in the South Pacific it was now a healthy bronze (actually, it is only healthy bronze in Edward's mind. In truth, it is more of a sickly pale white with a dash of tan.-Ed.). His head was bald, his eyes black and dull as an old razor, his nose shaped like a hook, like a Doonsebury comic character come to life. He had once been attractive, but those years were long gone.

Edward sat down on a rock as he stared at the sea. If they made a movie of my life,
who would play me in my golden years? Sean Connery? Yeah, sure, Edward. In your
dreams. Marlon Brando maybe. And that’s if you're lucky...

Edward thought back to his "life as a novel" analogy. If life was, in fact, like a novel, how would his book proceed? Edward tried to imagine a table of contents: Prologue, birth. Chapter 1, early childhood and education. Chapter two, high school. Chapter three, college. Chapter 4, your first book is published. Chapter 5, you become famous. Chapter 6, the good years: Wine, opera, wealth. Chapter 7, book sales start to fall. Chapter 8, writer's block. Chapter 9, hookers, drugs, and booze. Chapter 10, hookers, drugs and booze. Chapter 11, hookers drugs and booze. Chapter 12, rehab. Chapter 13, hookers, drugs and booze. Chapter 14, quit writing in general, move to a nearly deserted island in the South Pacific. Chapter 15, waste eight years of your life in solitude. Chapter 16, get old and hope to die soon.

And now, he was at the final chapter. About time.

Edward stared at the ocean, then rose up, his whole body aching. He pondered going down to the local village, then decided against it. No, he needed to be alone. He walked through the jungle, listened to the chirp of the tropical birds and the chatter of the insects. His house was large and located to the north of the island, where it was nice and quiet. And right now, Edward needed quiet. The voices in his head were quieter then they'd been in years, but to Edward theywere still a dull roar in his ears, never going away, with him till the day he died.

* * * *

One afternoon a week later...

Edward sat in the study of his house, staring down at his rusty old typewriter, the same typewriter he had wrote his very first novel with, 50 years ago. Sweat clung to his forehead. He stared at the typewriter, frustrated, his brain racing to find words, characters, setting and grabbing nothing but cobwebs. Edward began to type, with the caution of a child entering water for the first time. It had been so easy once, it shouldn't be any different now...

Edward typed: CHAPTER ONE.

Edward paused, thinking. Then he typed: THE END.

Then he typed THE END again.

THE END.

THE END.

THE END. THE END. THE END.

Edward's mind was blank. He couldn't think of anything. He then realized the cold, hard truth. He had no more stories to tell, no more characters to create, no more ideas period. He was out of stories, out of plotlines, out of time in general. The truth went down Edward's throatlike bitter acid, burning every inch of the way.

Edward howled, grabbed the typewriter, began smashing it against the wall, screaming out of control. SMASH SMASH SMASH until the typewriter, once the tool he used to create beautiful and wonderful worlds, was just a piece of destroyed machinery, as destroyed as his hopes and dreams.

Edward took a nap that afternoon to calm his nerves. He lay in his bed, his stereo playing Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. It was the "Gotterdammerung" segment, part 4, when Valhalla burned and the gods died. As Edward lied in bed he stared at his bookshelf. On one shelf were the twenty-five novels he had written, in the order they had been published. Edward stared at his books bitterly. Once, they had provided him with happy memories. Now they were as black and bleak and featureless as a monolith, and as ominous as a giant wall. It was almost like they were mocking him as he lay there dying. Those books had been his life. And now his life was over.

Still, at the very least, Edward still felt that he had tried his best. Sure, as the years flew by like pages turning in a book the novels had decreased in quality. However, even the worst of them had at least one good line of dialogue, one well-developed character, one good scene that still impressed even him. Edward may have been washed up, but he didn't see himself as a hack. He was just a tired old man. If he tried really hard, he could probably still crank out a greatnovel. He still felt he had a bit of his old talent left.

I may be a dying old man, but I did good. My books still stand up, or, at the very least, the good ones do. I created hundreds of memorable characters. That's all that matters, really Edward thought to himself. Years from now people will still be reading my work and realizing my genius.

Edward closed his eyes and drifted into uneasy sleep.

* * * *

One night a month later...

Edward was in his bed, dying. The village doctor stood over him, reading his temperature. The doctor sighed and shook his head. Edward would be dead by morning.

The doctor looked at Edward, who was hallucinating due to his high fever. The doctor was wondering what was going on in Edward's head. Too bad Edward had no friends or relatives to be by his side as he died. Edward truly was alone.

* * * *

Edward opened his eyes and gasped.

He was in bed, but his bedroom had changed. A forest of marble surrounded him:
Columns, regal balconies, and baroque architecture. The walls were very ornate, the arches laced with cherubs dancing to the heavens, while angels frolicked among the roof beams. Classical music played softly in the background.

"Am I in heaven?" Edward asked, feeling a little stupid.

"Not yet, but don't worry, you'll find out soon enough." said a voice to his left.

Edward turned his head and saw a tall pale man in a clown outfit standing near his bed.

Okay, this is odd Edward thought, frowning. What the fuck was going on?

"And you are?" Asked Edward.

"Oh, forgive me. Um, I am the Grim Reaper," replied the tall man, voice chipper.

"Where's the black robe?" Edward asked, confused.

"Black isn't my thing. I prefer happy colors," smiled the Grim Reaper.

"Shouldn't you have a sickle?" questioned Edward. Death always has a sickle, right?

"They won't let me use sickles anymore." shrugged the Grim Reaper.

"Why not?" Asked Edward.

"One night I was drunk and accidentally eviscerated myself." sighed the Grim Reaper.

"Ouch." winced Edward.

"You're telling me."

"So," Edward looked around. "What's going on?"

"Well, Edward, I'll be blunt. You're dying."

"I figured as much."

"However, no one deserves to die alone. So, I have a surprise for you. Some people
are coming by to give their respects. Well, actually, more then some. More like, every character you ever created."

"WHAT?"

Then the Grim Reaper vanished in a burst of smoke.

A door opened and a man stepped in the room. Edward looked him over. The man was tall and handsome, dressed in a tux. He seemed familiar.

"Hello, Edward." The man smiled. "Recognize me?"

"Um...no." Edward sighed. Still, this man looked familiar. Edward strained to remember...

"My name is Jack Leary. That name ring a bell?" Asked the man.

"Oh my God!" exclaimed Edward, eyes wide (the lead character of my first book!).

"Yup, good ole The Enigma Forest, the book that brought you critical acclaim. You never could top that one." Leary sighed and shook his head. "Anyway, I'll be quick, there's many others who must pay their respects. Or disrespects, as it were. But I digress. Anyway, thanks for giving me the lead part in your best book, I appreciate it."

"Uh, your welcome, I guess," Edward didn't know what to say.

"Too bad your other characters were not as lucky," Leary sighed and shook his head.

"Well, have a safe trip to the afterlife, it was nice living in your head for the past fifty years. Not to mention on millions of pages worldwide."

Leary walked away and Edward was alone again. Then he heard the door open.

Edward turned his head again and saw a new face by his bedside. This man was short and fat, with a scowl on his face. He was dressed in a military outfit.

"Recognize me?" The man asked, voice angry.

Edward shook his head.

"Solider number 14 in Empty War," scowled the man. "You only gave me one scene in that book!"

"Sorry." apologized Edward. "How can I remember you? I wrote hundreds of minor solider characters over the years!"

Oh shit, they'll all be visiting me too? Edward thought in alarm.

"You did not even give me a name!" spit out Solider Number 14.

"You weren't a main character! You weren't even a secondary character!" barked Edward. "I just needed you to die in the war!"

"Thanks a lot!" grumbled the solider. "You could have fleshed me out better, you know. I had a fascinating back-story, but no! You just used me in one tiny scene! What did I do to you that made you decide to flesh out other characters instead of me?"

"Its nothing personal, solider, I just needed a man to die in that scene. What was the point of fleshing out such a minor character? You served your purpose."

"Yeah, whatever. If having your head knocked off by a cannonball is a 'purpose'." The Solider snorted and walked off.

Next up was a man who was headless, just a walking body and nothing else.

"My name is Romeo. I was to be the star of your book The Profit. A book you quit on page three and never finished. You quit before you described what my head looked like. Now I am forever headless," moaned the unfinished character.

Edward shook his head. This'll be a long night he thought sadly.

* ** *

And so the procession continued, as character after character visited Edward's bedside to pay their final respects. Not just the main characters, but EVERY character he had created, from the heroes to the villains to the foils to the nobodies. It was a nearly endless parade of the people who had been living in Edward's head all his life, people he had given birth to through his typewriter. Some of the characters laughed with him, some laughed at him, some cursed at him,
some cried with him. But no matter who it was, they all had something to say.

Edward turned his head to look at the latest mourner. This man was tall and muscular, dressed like a pirate. In fact, it was a pirate. Edward guessed this one to be Captain Arthur "Red Blood" Dreyfuss, main character of his dreadful sixteenth novel, a pirate book Edward had written on the advice of his publisher. The critics (and reading audience at large) had never forgiven him for that one.

"Captain Red Blood!" exclaimed Edward. "Good to see you."

"Shut up, asshole," scowled the pirate. "How dare you give me the lead part in The
Pirate?"

"You are complaining because I made you a main character?" Edward asked, confused.

"Look at what book it was, matey! The Pirate! Your worst book! Couldn't you have made me the lead in The Enigma Forest? Or maybe Coldness? No, you give me The Pirate." and here the pirate shook his head. "That's all people will think when they hear the name Arthur 'Red Blood' Dreyfuss."

Edward began to apologize, but by that point the pirate had walked off.

"THAT WAS A GOOD BOOK, YOU UNGRATEFUL BASTARD!" Edward yelled.

Edward was starting to feel a tad sick. Why did all his characters hate him so much? Hehad tried so hard to flesh them out, to make them seem flesh and blood real. Well, at the very least, the major characters. Even the minor ones.

Who CARED about a freaking nameless solider?!?! The character wasn't important!

The door opened. Edward turned his head and gasped.

A gigantic dragon was near his bedside, a dragon easily the size of a house. The dragon had black scales covering his body and giant leathery wings. Spikes ran down his back, and his mouth was full of sharp pointy teeth the length of knives.This was Poisonreptyl, lead villain of Wizard And Wasteland, Edward's attempt at a fantasy novel.

"Remember me?" the dragon asked, voice civilized.

"Yes. Poisonreptyl." Edward sighed. He was a little intimidated by the dragon, but not scared. Why should he be scared? He was dying anyway. The dragon couldn't hurt him.

"You wrote me all wrong, you know," sighed the Dragon.

"Beg pardon?" Edward asked.

"I mean, you portrayed me as some demonic, power hungry tyrant!" Poisonreptyl roared. "For your information, I happen to be a kind, charitable individual."

"It was a fantasy novel, I needed a villain to capture the princess." said Edward in
frustration. "You had to be a villain!"

"Why not make the knight a bad guy! Have him capture a dragon princess and I'd have to save her from the knight!" countered Poisonreptyl.

"A villain knight? A heroic dragon? Nonsense!" snorted Edward.

"Its been done." Poisonreptyl sniffed. "Or you could have had me capture a prince and had a female knight save him."

Edward began to speak, then shut up.

"Then again, when it comes to characters, you always took the easy way out." Poisonreptyl shook his large head in sadness. "Why create original flesh and blood characters when you can resort to easy stereotypes? Lord knows you had many of those. The Arabic taxi driver who can't speak English. The tortured, suicidal repressed homosexual. The absent minded professor. The mad scientist. The Irish drunk. The pervert in the park. The priest child molester. The hooker with a heart of gold. Don't get me started on your misogyny towards women..."

"Fuck you." Edward cursed.

"Wow, good one. Great retort. And you call yourself a writer." The dragon laughed
scornfully, his great body shaking, his scales rattling. "I don't know what the critics saw in you. You are not a great writer. Not even a good one. Shit, not even a mediocre one. You, my sir, are a hack of the highest order. A man who churned out books like factories churn out cars. Somehow you duped millions of people into thinking you were one of the greatest writers of the modern age. For awhile it worked. Then you began to believe the myth. You became self-important. And your work suffered. And when the public was sick of you you hid your disappointment behind a veil of alcohol and prostitutes. And when you were through with that you ran and hid to your little island. And the most ironic thing is, you were never that good to
begin with."

Edward was silent for a moment, then he said "That's just your opinion. I think I handled your character well."

"Oh really?" Poisonreptyl's eyes widened. "Well, let's see."

A book appeared in the dragon's hands. Edward looked at the cover, saw it was Wizard
And Wasteland. The dragon flipped to page 100, then pulled out a pair of bifocals, which he delicately placed on his snout.

"Oh please!" Edward groaned.

"Shut up, I'm near-sighted." huffed Poisonreptyl. "Now, where was that passage... Ah, here it is!" He cleared his throat, then, in an oratical voice, read: "And thus the dragon Poisonreptyl looked at the brave knight and claimed 'I am your worst nightmare!'" The dragon closed the book and glared at Edward.

"So?" Edward asked.

"Its an awful line! No self-respecting dragon would ever use the line 'I am your worst nightmare'! It's a bad line, Eddie, it’s a cliché. A hack writer line. Myself, I would have said 'I will rend the flesh off your fetid bones, you walking tin can, and use your skeleton for kindling'. See, now that line jumps off the page. And the worst was my final line as I died: "Let history never forget my name, dark and evil as it is'." Poisonreptyl moaned in dismay.

Edward said "Its a good line."

"Its crap." said the dragon, dismissive.

"Its a great line."

"Its crap."

"Its POETIC."

"Its poetic crap." Poisonreptyl insisted, voice peevish. "You even have me breathe fire."

Edward paused, blinked, then screamed "DRAGONS BREATHE FIRE!"

Poisonreptyl looked at Edward with pity. "Oh Eddie, Eddie, Ed-DIE. Try to be original. A dragon breathing fire is out dated. Couldn't I breathe lightning instead?"

"That would distract the reader. People expect to see a dragon breathe fire."

"Yes, why make them think? Your books always were braindead. And easy."

"I'm your creator, Poisonreptyl. You should treat me with respect. I am your god!" Edward shouted.

Poisonreptyl sighed, then said "Well, you are our Wotan. But Wotan's staff has been

shattered. Now you will die and Valhalla will burn. Good day, sir."

And the dragon walked off.

Next was a short woman with green eyes and short black hair. She was wearing frumpy
clothes. Edward recognized her as Mary Baines, the child killer in his detective novel Blood Lust.

"Hello, Edward." she said, voice cool.

"Mary." Edward nodded.

"I'm pissed with you."

"Join the club. Why?"

"You made me a villain."

"The story needed a villain."

"Yes, but you never fleshed me out. There was a reason I killed those children. But you just made me a typical villain, uncomplicated, a stock character. You would never let people hear my side of the story." said Mary.

"Mary..." began Edward.

"Then again, your women were never fleshed out. Women were all the same to you. Whores and sluts, virgins and nuns, nurses and mothers, psychos and gossipers. Never any lesbians. Never any feminists. Never any strong females. You were a vile misogynist. Freud would have loved you. You were not a responsible writer. You slacked off with your characters. As our creator, you owed it to ALL of us to make us real. But you shirked your duties." scowled Mary.

"Hey now, that's a little harsh." grimaced Edward, stung by Mary's words.

"The truth is harsh. Even in real life you only used women for sex. It's no surprise you never got married. Not only are you a bad writer, but you're also a grade A scumbag." With that, Mary stormed off angrily.

Edward closed his eyes. He didn't think he could take much more of this.

* * * *

INTERMISSION

You put the story down, get up, rub your eyes. You yawn, then slowly walk into your
kitchen, where your boyfriend/girlfriend is cooking dinner.

"How's that story honey?" s/he asks you.

"Pretty odd," You say. "It began as this story about some old novelist waiting to die on some island, but now its about that author being visited by every character he ever created as he dies."

"Sounds metafictional." replies your boyfriend/girlfriend.

"I don't know what to think about it yet." You say.

"Why don't you go finish it?" s/he asks.

"Good idea." You say. You eat an oreo, then return to your chair, pick up the story, and continue reading.

END OF INTERMISSION

* * * *

To Edward, the night seemed to be going on forever as his brain vomited out every
character he had ever created, each with something to say. They just never seemed to stop coming.

Damn, why'd I write so many fucking books? thought Edward in anger.

The procession now seemed operatic in scale, like the operas Edward had enjoyed years ago just one million times larger. The classical music that had been playing in the background was gone now, opera music in its place as thousands of voices sang an endless, unrelenting chorus, their voices reverberating all over the room.

And the characters kept coming, each one a major player, each one trailing clouds of ether in their wake.

LET ME DIE! screamed Edward's brain.

The door opened again.

Edward turned and saw...

HIMSELF.

"Huh?" asked Edward.

"Hello, Edward." smiled the Edward clone. "I am Oswald Kafka. Remember me?"

Of course! thought Edward. Oswald Kafka, the lead of his thirteenth novel, Slug Bait. The only character he had ever modeled after himself, in his own image.

"Well, I've got some good new for you, my friend. The procession is finally almost over. After me, there's only one character left." replied Oswald, his voice the same as Edward's.

"Thank heavens." Edward said in relief.

"You know, it’s ironic. All your life you thought you were alone, but you were never really alone. You always had US, trapped inside your head, screaming to get out. And you let us out. And we made you millions of dollars. You created us, you were our God, you gave us life. Now your life is almost over, but we'll live forever." Oswald chuckled.

"Huh?" Asked Edward.

"Don't play stupid, Edward." sighed Oswald. "As long as people still read your books, we will always live on. I mean, think of Shakespeare. Whenever someone reads one of his plays, the characters of Hamlet, Juliet, Brutus, et al come to life. But Shakespeare... He's dead forever."

"Yes, but people still have an interest in Shakespeare." said Edward.

"He's still dead." Oswald shrugged. "But my point is the characters he created live on. Characters in books are eternal. As long as the books survive, so do we. Do you have ANY idea how long Beowulf has been alive? Or Sherlock Holmes? Or Lady Macbeth? We will live forever, Edward, while our creator's bones turn to dust."

"Yes, but I created you in my image. You're just like me. Doesn't that mean I'll still live on?"

"Metaphorically, yes, I guess. Like a meme, I suppose. But it’s different. Anyhow, your time is almost up. I have one question... Why did you become a writer?" asked Oswald, his voice dead serious.

"I wanted to create, I guess. There were voices in my head begging to be let out." said Edward.

"Poppycock." grinned Oswald. "You did it for two reasons: Fame, and because you were
scared."

"Scared?" Edward asked.

"Yes, scared." Oswald nodded. "Remember that day long ago, when you were five years
old? Your mom and dad had gotten into a bad fight. Your dad hit your mom. You got scared and ran upstairs. You wanted to hide. You began to write a short story, about a giant owl named Mr. Feathers who killed your father and who then lived happily with you and your mother forever. You had so much fun writing that story that writing became your escape from a life that was too painful. All your fears and insecurities and private obsessions manifested themselves on to the page, things you could not face within yourself, things you camouflaged as literature. That's been your whole life Edward, always running, always hiding, all because of that one incident when you were young. Your entire writing career has just been a shield to protect you from a harsh world. And when your writing career failed, when the book ideas stopped coming, you ran and hid from society on this island.

"Well, its time to stop running and hiding, Edward."

And Oswald left, leaving Edward speechless.

Yet it was true, all of it, everything Oswald had said was true. Of course it was Oswald whopointed it out, seeing as Oswald was his doppelganger. Edward had, in a way, come to the same conclusion. He was Oswald. He had realized his problem.

He was a hack. He was a shitty writer. His children were right.

All those years of his life wasted, running from problems he was too cowardly to face, writing books to escape his past, all the while convincing himself that he was doing somethingworthwhile, something artistic, something important.

He had lied to himself. And now his characters had shown him the truth.

His lifework, all that people would remember him by, his books, were nothing but empty shit.The scared, crude, nonsense ravings of a boy terrified of the world. He had never been anything,except in his own head. He was his characters, and his characters were nothing.

It was too much for Edward to comprehend. He felt like his guts had been ripped out.

The room became dark, and the walls of the death chamber started to disintegrate into waves of static, as the opera was drowned out by industrial sounds and white noise. Edward was almost dead. Everything was crumbling apart. Valhalla was burning. The god was dying, deserted by his children. He was alone.

And Edward, at the end of his life, was scared. Scared and, at the same time, bitter with regret. Regret that his life, when all was said and done, had amounted to nothing.

Then the door opened for the final time. Edward turned...

And by his bed was a giant owl. Regal, authoritative, wise and comforting. A private security blanket from 70 years ago.

It was Mr. Feathers. His first character ever.

"Mr. Feathers!" said Edward.

Mr. Feathers seemed to smile at him.

"Mr. Feathers, I'm scared. Please protect me. I need you now, in my final hour." said Edward, voice childish.

You'll be okay, Edward said a voice in Edward's head. Mr. Feather's voice.

Mr. Feathers flew on to Edward's bed. Edward grabbed the large owl and hugged him
tightly, resting his head against the warm feathers of the owl. The noise was louder now as the room fell apart. A mighty howl cut through the air, but Edward was not afraid. Holding on to Mr. Feathers, he felt safe. Mr. Feathers had comforted him in his darkest hour 70 years ago, and would not fail him now.

The room was pure static now, and slowly the world began to fade into darkness as chaos slowly gave way to solitude. Edward just hung on to Mr. Feathers, waiting to go to the other side.

As Edward died, as everything went to black, he had time for one more thought...

You were never alone.

Edward closed his eyes and, feeling strangely comforted, died.

And his children, their god dead at last, were set free.

And likewise the god was free of them.

My Creative Workspace

2010-12-15T09:32:00.000-08:00

This is the desk in my bedroom where my computer is located. It was at this desk that I typed out all of Confusion and Grimoire.

A far view of my workspace.

Atop my desk I keep a few statues and figurines for company. From left to right: Bast, Cthulhu, L, and Mr. Feathers the Owl. Behind them one can see a model of Seattle's Space Needle made from Lego bricks and a little totem statue that my parents got me as a gift while vacationing in Alaska a few years ago.

Maybe I'd get more writing done if I had a less distracting Desktop background...

... or if my personal space wasn't constantly being invaded by a certain persnickety feline named Amber!

The Yellow Notebook

2010-12-14T12:02:00.001-08:00

In my introductory post for this blog, I mentioned something about working on a short story entitled "The Yellow Notebook." Incredibly, even though I started that story on the 5th of November, over a month ago, I still haven't finished it, and it's not as if it's even supposed to be that long. Yet I'm only on page 15. Part of the reason why it's been going so slow, I suppose, is that I've only been working on it during my breaks at work: I'm writing out the first draft by hand in one of those black Gallery Leather journals that was handcrafted in Bar Harbor, Maine, with the idea that when it's done I'll type it out and that will be the second and final draft. Were I not toiling on other projects, I could have finished it awhile ago.

I suppose, at some point, I'll have to choose to focus on either doing novels or short stories. But I'm so indecisive. On one hand, short stories are a good fit for me because they're easier to edit than novels and one can really work hard making each individual sentence stand out (whereas with a longer novel it's harder to polish it like that). But one thing I like about novels is creating characters one can feel an emotional connection with: it's hard to do that with characters in short stories because you just don't spend as much time with them. What I might end up doing is this: any horror-orientated ideas I'll save for short stories (because as both H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti noted, the short story is the ideal format for tales related to the horrific or the supernatural), whereas my non-horror ideas I'll try to turn into novels.

As for "The Yellow Notebook," the idea for this new story came to me one night at work when, a half hour before we closed up for the night, I was approached by a customer who looked a lot like that science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick. He was looking for some very unusual New Age type books (mainly ones revolving around communicating with angelic hierarchies), and he had this really weird yellow notebook with him, the pages of which were filled up with all kinds of bizarre sentences, recorded dreams, notes on weather patterns, weird New Age terminology, stuff like that. God, I'd do anything to get my hands on that notebook so I could read it at my own speed. Anyway, this guy's notebook gave me an idea for a horror story. It's funny, how random, everyday events can give one grist for fictional creations.

In theory, I suppose I should be writing right now instead of writing about how I'm not writing, but somedays one just can't force it.

Odd book covers #1: "Faragon Fairingay"

2010-12-13T13:41:00.000-08:00

My brothers and I sometimes like to poke fun at our dad's book collection, which consists mostly of bulky fantasy novels in the J.R.R. Tolkien/Robert Jordan/Stephen R. Donaldson/Terry Brooks vein (though there are exceptions, including the horror novels of Stephen King and Peter Straub and about a million Alistair MacLean spy novels). Even my dad admits that he's purchased some crappy fantasy books over the years, and when pressed for example he'll usually mention Niel Hancock's "Circle of Light" series (originally published in the late 1970's), which he bought mainly because on the front cover there was a blurb recommending it to fans of the Lord of the Rings series. The cover art for the "Circle of Light" series during its original printing was done by Hancock's wife, are all pretty amusing, but the best cover award goes to book two in the series, 1977's Faragon Fairingay, which, as you can see, depicts a woman apparently nursing a sick otter lying in a human bed. The otter's little slippers on the floor nearby are an inspired artistic touch, I feel.

The plot of the book, taken from Amazon's description of the item: "Welcome to Atlanton Earth! In this second spellbinding adventure that began with Greyfax Grimwald, friends Bear, Dwarf, and Otter are joined by Faragon Fairingay, the valiant young warrior. Sent to Lower Earth at the request of Lorini, the Lady of Light, the four allies embark on a fateful quest in search for the legendary Arkenchest and its vital Five Secrets. Never before has the trio of friends ventured so far--and risked so much--for so glorious a prize."

I know that Hancock was inspired by Buddhist ideas, but the plot description of the book doesn't sound all that promising. Probably better to just admire the cover art instead.

A "Grimoire" timeline

2010-12-11T19:54:00.000-08:00

August 25th, 2008- began working on a short story entitled "Mauve Movies." Began making preliminary notes for a horror short story/novella collection.

October 2008- complete work on "Mauve Movies."

November 26, 2008: begin a new story, "Under the Leaves."

December 8th, 2008- came up with a name for the project: Grimoire(the other title I was considering was Mythos). Later on in December I decided the collection would consist of 11 interconnected stories. I also finish two stories this month: "Under the Leaves" and "London After the Rain." It was decided that a short story I wrote in 2006, "The Apocalypse Inoculation," would also be part of the collection.

January 2009- in a burst of creativity, write three stories this month: "The Opticon Prism," "Nihil" (which at first was entitled "Grimoire"), and "The Old Chemical Factory."

February 2009- finished another story entitled "Don't Fear the Reaper." Later on that month write a new story called "18 Fragments of a Nightmare."

March 2009- finished work on a story named "Mr. Orwig's Midnight Monologues."

April 2009- finished the final two stories originally planned for the project, "The Agony of the Plasma" and "The Nightmare Syndicate." Incorporated "The Opticon Prism" within "The Nightmare Syndicate." Completion of the first draft of Grimoire. This month I also began the very long editing process, which occupied most of my summer. At the same time I began seeking out a publisher, a very frustrating experience to say the least.

August 2009- cut two stories out of the collection ("Don't Fear the Reaper" and "The Agony of the Plasma") and replaced them with two new ones ("The Onyx Glossary" and "They Came From the Shadow of God").

September/October 2009- radically rewrote "The Apocalypse Inoculation" and re-titled it as "Reaping Time has Come." Completion of the second draft. Around this time I got a friend of mine, Stafford Stone, to create the cover art for the book.

Oct. 31st, 2009- released Grimoire as a free PDF on my Mauve Zone Recordings netlabel.

December 2009- wrote a new story named "The Withering Echo."

March 2010- decided to self-publish Grimoire through Lulu for my friends who wanted to own a physical copy of the book. Ended up self-publishing the third draft, which included a bonus story not included in the PDF version ("The Withering Echo") along with an interview.

April 2010- receive an e-mail from Rebel Satori Press (who I had submitted samples of Grimoire to a few months before) saying they wanted to publish it. Took the self-published version off of Lulu (thus making the few copies of that version to be very scarce indeed... can you say collector's items, ha ha?)

Now, the final step will be to go over the proofs and make sure I didn't miss any major typos. One of my friends who does copy editing work for a living will also be reading the proofs, which I'm very grateful for. Once I approve those, then the book will be ready to be released and I can move on to a new project, details of which will be posted soon.

Seeing as I decided to cut the interview I wrote for the Lulu version from the officially published version, I might end up posting it on this blog at some point in the future for those interested in a more in-depth look at the creation of Grimoire.

Grimoire News

2010-12-06T18:12:00.000-08:00

Today I was informed that the most likely release date for Grimoire will be sometime in either January or February of next year. Thus bringing to a close a project I've been working hard on for 2 1/2 years now. The final step will involve reading the page proofs it would seem. More details to follow. In the meantime, here's some blurbs from a few other writers who have been kind enough to provide some "advance praise":

“James Champagne's Grimoire is a brilliant, gloriously rich collection with a fastidious, lush, secretive style and stories as compelling as they are circuitous as they are instructive as they are confounding. One of the most indescribable, original, and impressive books of fiction I've read in a long time.”
--Dennis Cooper, author of the George Miles Cycle

“James Champagne's tour de force, Grimoire, creates a world where belief is a spell, meaning is a mantra, and the failed thoughts of a black mind rise again to reclaim their shinning majesty.”
-Mark Gluth, author of The Late Work Of Margaret Kroftis

“Here is a new voice in horror writing who’s uniquely imaginative work shows the breadth of his influences: from The Greats of the past, Lovecraft and M.R. James to 21st century graphic novel writers Neil Gaiman/Grant Morrison and transgressive recording artists Current 93/David Tibet.

Here you will find traditional Locked Room stories next to tales containing wildly imaginative conceits: shelves of human beings that sentient books ‘read’ and a nightmarish ending wherein the narrator is trapped in the grooves of a record he had been haunted by before.

Apart from the often disturbing horror and off-beat meditation on the human condition there is also great humour: from observations on the real world of Wal-Mart madness to the comic monologues of Mr Orwig.

James Champagne writes in a new and distinct style that will present to you satisfyingly familiar concepts and conceits as well as startle you with the new and hitherto unimagined.”
-Joseph Mills, author of Towards the End and Obsessions

PunkModernist sample: page 145

2010-12-03T19:19:00.000-08:00

(Click on image for a closer view).

Previous Works/Juvenilia

2010-12-03T13:06:00.000-08:00

Title: Janine and the Jedbeast
Year Completed: 1995
My age at the time of writing: 15
Begun: May 1995 Finished: August 1995
Page Count: 160 pages
Genre: Fantasy
Description: This was the first book in my "Magic Fantasy Trilogy," and the first book I wrote out by hand on folded up sheets of paper. It was heavily inspired (that is, ripped-off) by the Super Nintendo video game Final Fantasy III (VI in Japan). It was also very much inspired by Star Wars. (Note: the front cover of this book is currently missing). The plot revolves around an epic war being raged between the cruel Empire and the freedom-loving Crusader rebel alliance, and how magical creatures named Jedbeasts influence the course of this struggle.
Opening Sentence: "Lightning purpled the clouds above the mountains of Marshe."
Concluding Sentence: "So do I, kid, so do I," sighed Ray.

Title: Rise of the Empire
Year Completed: 1995
My age at the time of writing: 15
Begun: Late August 1995 Finished: November 1995?
Page Count: 128 pages
Genre: Fantasy
Description: This was the second book in my "Magic Fantasy Trilogy," and the second book I wrote out by hand on folded up sheets of paper.
Opening Sentence: "Here we are," said Ray calmly. "Monarch Castle."
Concluding Sentence: "To the people of Magic Earth!"

Title: War in Magic Earth
Year Completed: 1996
My age at the time of writing: 15
Begun: November 1995 Finished: January 1996
Page Count: 260 pages
Genre: Fantasy
Description: This was the third and final book in my "Magic Fantasy Trilogy," and the third book I wrote out by hand on folded up sheets of paper. This book also had a strong Star Wars influence in that it featured a weapon of war known as the "Doom Star." (Note: the front cover of this book is currently missing).
Opening Sentence: "As far as most things went, it was a beautiful morning, especially as Jonathan Crane saw it."
Concluding Sentence: "Then she let the wind blow through her hair."

Title: Bullet Games
Year Completed: 1996
My age at the time of writing: 16
Begun: August 1996 Finished: August 1996
Page Count: 280 pages
Genre: Sports Thriller
Description: With "Bullet Games" I decided to set fantasy aside and focus on reality, or what passed for my own twisted notion of it when I was 16. The plot revolves around the 1993-1994 season of the basketball team known as the Washington Bullets, and their struggle to win the championship that season, while fending off attacks carried out by the Irish Republican Army and the insane GM of the Boston Celtics. This book was heavily inspired by the novels of Tom Clancy, who I was reading at the time, especially Patriot Games (which inspired my own title) and Debt of Honor.
Opening Sentence: "It was a cold night at the palace of Auburn Hills in Detroit, Michigan."
Concluding Sentence: "Then he smiled."

Title: The Hornet Queen
Year Completed: 1997
My age at the time of writing: 17
Begun: July 1997 Finished: August 1997
Page Count: 312 Pages
Genre: Sports Thriller
Description: A sort of follow-up (though not a sequel) to my previous basketball novel. This one follows the 1996-1997 season of the Charlotte Hornets basketball team. When the team bus explodes in a freak accident a few days before the start of the season, the Hornets have to quickly rebuild their team, and they make history by hiring the NBA's first female coach. With this book I tried hard to focus on characterization, and it was my first book to feature both profanity and sex (both heterosexual and homosexual). It was inspired by the novels of John Grisham and by the Pulp Fiction screenplay, though I didn't actually watch the film itself until a few months after the book was completed. Out of all my early works, this one is one of my favorites. (Note: the front cover of this book is currently missing).
Opening Sentence: "Muggsy Bogues sat on the sidewalks of Charlotte, head in his hands."
Concluding Sentence: "She fell asleep, and she smiled."

Title: Arthouse
Year Completed: 1998
My age at the time of writing: 17
Begun: November 1997 Finished: March 1998
Page Count: 270 Pages
Genre: Erotica
Description: This book, which I started shortly after the completion of The Hornet Queen, is probably my favorite of all the books I wrote while in high school (and this was the final book I wrote as a high school student). Essentially a character study, it had almost no plot and consisted of meandering, naturalistic dialogue and endless pop culture references. The "story" revolves around suicidal artist Iris Brant and her small circle of slacker friends, and how Iris realizes she's a lesbian upon falling in love with her model, Xenia Maijenski (who I imagined to look like Lucy Lawless, who I had the hots for at the time). This book also featured a lot of "erotic" sex scenes.
Opening Sentence: "Iris Brant lived in Providence, Rhode Island."
Concluding Sentence: "Iris pushed it open, and the two women walked out into the morning light, walked out to a new life."

Title: Season of the Butterfly
Year Completed: 1998
My age at the time of writing: 18
Begun: August 1998 Finished: September 1998
Page Count: 282 pages
Genre: Surrealism
Description: This very strange book was a sort of bizarre tribute to the films of the Coen Brothers, and also the first book I wrote as a college freshman. The "plot" revolves around a basketball team that hires a fixer to rig their games, and all the weird things that happen to them that season. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense and it's kind of silly. I hated this book at the time I completed it but in hindsight it has a kind of quirky and offbeat surrealistic charm that sets it apart from my early works. (Note: the front cover of this book is currently missing).
Opening Sentence: "The Target Center was home to the Minnesota Timberwolves."
Concluding Sentence: "She rested her head on Dinah's shoulder as she looked out the window... and the sun was bright, the birds chirped, and the butterflies flew through the flowers..."

Title: Twist
Year Completed: 1999
My age at the time of writing: 18
Begun: February 1999 Finished: March 1999
Page Count: 230 pages
Genre: Noir
Description: A very concise book that I wrote during my Freshman year at college in a period of 13 days. It was inspired by the Coen Brothers film Blood Simple and also by Scott Smith's novel A Simple Plan. It's probably the most tightly-plotted thing I've ever written. The plot revolves around 3 corrupt cops, a double-crossing private eye, and four million dollars in illegal drug money. Naturally, by the end almost everyone is dead. The front cover art is a direct copy of the cover art of the Bauhaus Swing the Heartache: The BBC Sessions CD.
Opening Sentence: "The police station in Green Springs, Ohio had a single spiral staircase that twisted up to the top floor like a corkscrew."
Concluding Sentence: "Deep in her heart, Melissa still felt like a decent human being..."

Title: Red Cherry
Year Completed: 1999
My age at the time of writing: 19
Begun: August 1999 Finished: September 1999
Page Count: 360 pages
Genre: Serial Killer/Police Procedural
Description: This book was inspired by the novels of Thomas Harris and the film Se7en, and it was written prior to the start of my Sophomore year at college. I spent about three months researching it beforehand, and included a three page bibliography at the end. It's probably the most conventional book I've ever written. The book takes place in Boston and revolves around a serial killer named the Photographer, who kidnaps supermodels, kills them, then takes photographs of their dead bodies. It's up to a lesbian homicide detective named Marsha Garland to stop him. The front cover art was inspired by the work of Francis Bacon.
Opening Sentence: "A small apartment in Boston's Back Bay District, located on the fourth floor of an apartment house on Massachusetts Avenue."
Concluding Sentence:"And in a world as bleak as ours, that's quite an accomplishment."

Title: Illuminated Shadows
Year Completed: 2000
My age at the time of writing: 20
Begun: July 2000 Finished: October 2000
Page Count: 316 pages
Genre: Fantasy
Description: the first book in the "Trinity Trilogy" and the last book I wrote out by hand... also the final novel I wrote during my college years. It was inspired by goth and industrial music (especially Nine Inch Nails), Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic, the novels of Poppy Z. Brite, and the Thief computer game series. Recently I've begun work on the long-delayed sequel, to be titled The Marble Index.
Opening Sentence: "Night falls on the city of Zone like an inky black curtain encrusted with stars."
Concluding Sentence: "A shadow fell over Oment's face."

Title: PunkModernist
Year Completed: 2004
My age at the time of writing: 23
Begun: Spring 2003 Finished: March 2004
Page Count: 391 pages
Genre: Occult Thriller
Description: This book started out as a 23 page short story entitled "The Supermarket" that I wrote for an advanced creative writing class during my final semester at Rhode Island College. After graduating I started expanding on it and it eventually became a giant novel, that to date is still the longest book I've ever written. The story concerns a disgruntled supermarket employee named Susan Curtis, who gets initiated into a secret society of bizarre terrorists known as the PunkModernists. She finds out that the governments of the world are controlled by a reptilian conspiracy, and soon finds herself battling alien lizards, Gnostic archons, pretentious vampires, and the President of the United States, as she struggles to discover the secrets of reality itself. The book was a homage to the comic books of Grant Morrison, Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy, and the wacko conspiracy theories of David Icke. This was the first book I ever typed out using a computer.
Opening Sentence: "Reality Bites. That's my first motto. My second motto is 'Fuck You.'"
Concluding Sentence: CLASSIFIED

Title: Confusion
Year Completed: 2006
My age at the time of writing: 25-26
Begun: April 2005 Finished: July 2006
Page Count: 302 pages
Genre: 80's Historical Fiction
Description: Confusion was the second novel I've ever typed out on computer, and I liked it enough to self-publish it through iUniverse in 2006. A homage to the novels of Bret Easton Ellis (who I was obsessed with at the time), the main character is pretty much the decade of the 1980's as a whole and my thoughts on it. The story revolves around the existential angst of ultra-materialistic gay pop star Sypha Nadon, and all of the odd people and adventures he experiences while living in Miami from 1985 to 1986. I think it's probably my funniest book, and while it has many flaws (including a lot of typos I wish I could have caught), I quite enjoyed writing this book. I'd love to get it published for real one day, in an edition where I could fix some of these flaws. The front cover art was done by Grant Cook.
Opening Sentence: "This is a journey..."
Concluding Sentence: "I don't care."

Introductory Statement

2010-12-03T11:01:00.000-08:00

In an attempt to get more organized in regards to my writing endeavors, I decided it would behoove me to erect a blog designed specifically to focus on my multiple creative projects. With that in mind, I've decided to give birth to this pallid moonchild, The Onyx Glossary, a reliquary of words that shall serve as the official place where interested parties can get news related to my various writing projects.

A brief history of my life as a writer: I've pretty much been writing my entire life. I won a young author's contest both in grade school and also in middle school, but it wasn't until high school that I started to take writing all that seriously. It was around that point in my life that I started to write out entire books by hand, on folded up pieces of paper, and many of these books were as long as 300 pages (the biggest one topped the 360 page mark). I wrote six of these kinds of books in high school and four during my first two years of college. In college I began taking a number of creative writing courses where I temporarily abandoned the novel form to focus on poetry and short stories. Upon graduating from Rhode Island College in 2003 with a degree in English, I began typing out my first full-length novel, PunkModernist, which had at first been a short story I had written during my final year at RIC as an assignment for an advanced creative writing course... this 23 page short story blossomed into a nearly 400 page novel. To date I have not tried to have it published though, as it was just an experiment to prove to myself I could type out a novel on computer. In 2005 through 2006 I typed out a second novel, Confusion, which I self-published through iUniverse towards the end of that year. In 2007 a short story of mine appeared in the anthology known as Userlands, published by Akashic Books and edited by Dennis Cooper. It was my first official publishing credit. In 2008 I began writing a number of horror stories which ended up being collected into a single volume I entitled Grimoire. This collection of interconnected short stories, which I completed in late 2009 and continue to polish, will be published by Rebel Satori Press sometime in the near future.

My goals as a writer are fairly modest. I know I'll never be a big-shot novelist, but I wouldn't want to be anyway (I wouldn't mind the money, though). I'd be much happier to be a cult writer with a small but fanatical following that I could take the time to interact with. My dream is to one day get to a point where the editors who compile anthologies of short stories ask me to contribute stories for them, rather than the other way around. As a longtime admirer of the literary genre known as "Weird Fiction," it would be cool to be mentioned in the same breath as such diseased luminaries as H.P. Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti, and Ramsey Campbell.

Although this blog has been created mainly as a way to track my literary "career," I also intend to fill it with other material: reviews of books I've read, videos I watch online that I find enjoyable, articles related to the occult and religion (my favorite pet topics), shout-outs related to books or stories published by my other writer friends, entries related to books or stories I've written in the past, and so on.

Finally, a bit of biographical data related to myself. My name is James Champagne. At the time of this writing I am 30 years old. I was born on June 17, in the year MCMLXXX, and I have lived in the city of Woonsocket in the state of Rhode Island my entire life. I am the oldest of four brothers, and at the moment work part-time at a Barnes & Noble bookstore. In terms of politics I'm fairly liberal (especially in relation to social issues). In terms of religion I identify as a Gnostic though I also have a fascination with Thelema, the Hermetic Qabalah and also Eastern religions (in particular Buddhism and Hinduism). My favorite animal is the cat, of which I have two. My favorite color is black, then blue, then mauve. My favorite food is pasta. My favorite TV shows include Friends, Glee, Monk, Frasier, Mr. Bean, and the Death Note anime. My favorite film directors are Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, and David Lynch. My favorite school of art is Surrealism, followed by Pop and Symbolism (favorite artists include Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Max Ernst, Odilon Redon, Leonora Carrington, Man Ray, Gilbert & George, Edward Gorey, H.R. Giger, and Camille Rose Garcia). In my spare time, aside from writing, I enjoy creating electronic music (much of which ends up on my Mauve Zone Recordings netlabel). Recently I've also begun visiting the old cemeteries and churches of my hometown, a practice I find extremely relaxing and artistically satisfying.

In terms of music my top ten groups or acts are Current 93, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Nine Inch Nails, Whitehouse, Madonna, Throbbing Gristle, Coil, Ministry, Nurse With Wound, and Sonic Youth. Some modern acts I like include Lady Gaga, Adam Lambert, Justin Bieber, and Greyson Chance. My top ten favorite albums of all time (in no particular order) are:

Nico: The Marble Index
Manic Street Preachers: The Holy Bible
The Residents: Third Reich and Roll
Siouxsie & the Banshees: Join Hands
Coil: Horse Rotorvator
Current 93: Imperium
Nurse With Wound: Merzbild Schwet
Sonic Youth: Daydream Nation
Nine Inch Nails: Pretty Hate Machine
Whitehouse: Asceticists 2006

My literary heroes include H.P. Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti, William S. Burroughs, Dennis Cooper, Bret Easton Ellis, Grant Morrison, J.K. Huysmans, Kenneth Grant, Poppy Z. Brite, Kathy Acker, Cormac McCarthy, Jean Genet, J.G. Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges, Stephen R. Donaldson, and Vladimir Nabokov.

It would be nice if I can add content to this blog everyday, if only to keep myself intellectually occupied. Time shall tell.